What Could A Cybercriminal Do To Your Dental Practice

You’re probably familiar with the term Ransomware and the financial toll it’s been taking on companies worldwide. One lesson that we continue to learn time and time again is that nobody is immune to this cyber threat – not even your dental practice.

Instances of cybercrime have reached an all-time high and ensuring that your dental practice has the procedures in place to guard against an army of determined fraudsters is more important than ever. But before you can implement effective controls, you must have a clear understanding of what it is that threatens your practice.

Know Your Enemy

Ransomware is the infection of a computer that immediately encrypts all recognizable file types. Once your network is infected, a screen will appear on your monitor, conveying the hacker’s demand: pay a ransom in exchange for your dental practice’s data to be “decrypted” and released or lose it all. The hackers then set the clock, making it clear that if the ransom is not paid before the deadline, your practice’s data will be destroyed.

4 Tips To Help Prevent A Ransomware Attack

But this doesn’t have to happen to your dental practice. To protect your practice against Ransomware and other similar threats, I recommend following these best practices:

1. Train office staff to identify phishing emails. Numerous vendors can provide your dental practice with phishing tests and video training to help educate your office’s staff about phishing emails and ways to identify possible scams. The goal is to change the mindset of those within your dental practice when it comes to opening attachments and clicking on hyperlinks.
2. Set your staff’s Microsoft Active Directory rights. It’s unlikely that all your employees will need full-access to your dental practice’s entire database to do their jobs effectively. One way to protect your data is to only grant access to the databases each employee needs to do perform their job duties. This way, if an attack does occur, the damage can be isolated.
3. Do you use outdated software or office products? If the answer is yes, those need updated right away. Microsoft, for example, regularly stops supporting older versions of its operating system, which means the company is no longer putting in the effort to build and provide security patches for its users. If your software company is no longer providing you with software updates, you actually are at a higher risk of a security breach.
4. Implement a Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan. Some research indicates that only about 35 percent of small- to medium-sized businesses have a working and comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Is your dental practice included in this statistic? Business owners like you are learning time and time again just how important it is to have a plan in place to protect your business when crisis strikes. A DR plan, complete with regular plan testing and offsite backup data, will help prepare you for unforeseen events which, under current circumstances, could prove to be catastrophic.

Want to learn more about what you can do to keep your dental practice safe? Contact us today for more information about protecting your dental practice from cybercrime.