The Cyberwar Against Healthcare Practices

While physicians worked to keep their practices financially afloat and dealt with COVID-19, hackers kept busy, too. From January through October of last year, there were 730 publicly disclosed security breaches with more than 22 billion records exposed, according to the cybersecurity firm Tenable. Health care made up 25% of those breaches with nearly 8 million records exposed. 

Following a breach, practices will often go on a cybersecurity shopping spree, buying all kinds of software to prevent it from happening again, but Ferrante says that’s usually not effective. “It has to be applied the right way, and you really need the expertise to make sure that it’s scalable and set up correctly. Otherwise, it’s not going to function properly.”