Why Small Medical Practices Are at Great Risk for a Cyber Attack

The good people at ClinicSpectrum recently shared a look at why small practices are at risk for a cyber attack. They label it as why your EHR is at risk for a cyber attack, but I think their list is more specific to small practices as opposed to EHR. Take a look at their list:

Each of these issues should be considered by a small medical when it comes to why they are at risk for a cyber attack. However, the first one is one that I see often. Many small practices wonder, “Why would anyone want to hack my office?”

When it comes to that issue, medical practices need to understand how most hackers work. Most hackers aren’t trying to hack someone in particular. Instead, they’re just scouring the internet for easy opportunities. Sure, there are examples where a hacker goes after a specific target. However, the majority are just exploiting whatever vulnerabilities they can find.

This is why it’s a real problem when medical practices think they’re too small or not worth hacking. When you have this attitude, then you leave yourself vulnerable to opportunistic hackers that are just taking advantage of your laziness.

The best thing a medical practice can do to secure their systems is to care enough about having secure systems. You’ll never be 100% secure, but those organizations who act as if they don’t really care about security are almost guaranteed to be hacked. You can imagine how HHS will look at you if you take this approach and then get hacked.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

Categories