Five Activities to Protect Your Healthcare Organization from Cyber Attacks

4 out of 5 physicians have experienced a cybersecurity attack. Is your practice safe?

• In 2016, a private hospital suffered a ransomware attack which froze all computer systems. This shut down the hospital, and patients had to be transferred to nearby health care institutions. After a week, the hospital paid a $17,000 ransom to regain full operational control.
• An orthopedic practice was hacked via a breach of a software vendor’s log-in credentials. This breach put a half-million people at risk of identity theft, and 500 patient profiles appeared for sale on the dark web, leaving names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other personal health information (PHI) exposed.

• Regulatory fines: HIPAA treats data breaches as a violation, and fines can reach up to $1.5 million.
• Patient lives at risk: Hackers can access your computer network and shut down networked devices such as heart monitors, putting your patients in grave danger.

1. Enforce email security. Implementing a quality spam filter will enable your organization to detect email with malicious content and links. Training your staff to recognize suspicious emails and use multifactor authentication will help detect and prevent phishing and malware.
2. Protect yourself from ransomware. Implementing an endpoint protection system can harness powerful machine learning to protect against ransomware attacks.
3. Implement a state-of-the-art firewall system. A strong firewall serves as a “first line of defense”, by blocking unsolicited traffic from intruding into your network.
4. Backup your data. Frequent and regular backups of your organization’s data can allow your organization to recover quickly in case of any security incidents.