Canadian Healthcare Increasingly Targeted by Cybercrime
Malicious ransomware attacks on Canadian Healthcare facilities are on the rise. Recently, CBC news reported about on a Toronto dentist that experienced an attack, leaving 19 of his clinic’s 22 computers encrypted, which forced employees to take notes on paper. Clients were concerned that their personal data had been stolen, and the hacker behind the ransomware attack demanded $165,000 to release the data. That cost outweighs what a dependable hosted cyber defense and backup solution would have cost them.
Cybercrime implications on Canadian healthcare data is not only expensive – it prevents them from assisting patients in need.
Earlier this month, the Michael Garron Hospital was hit by a variant of Ryuk ransomware, delivered to the facility via an undetected malicious email link. IT experts determined that the malware was attempting to exfiltrate data. This didn’t stop the hacker from forcing the hospital to postpone life-saving surgeries, while forcing the employees to resort to paper documentation. Remote VPN’s were shut off, and the hospital declared their IT environment to be in Code Grey for almost a week. The cost of the potential disaster is still being calculated. Public healthcare institutions are already lacking funds– they can’t afford cybercriminal activity to cease critical data while stopping crucial business functions.
Hosted Solutions that Meet the needs of Healthcare Organizations
While cybercrime can be a major concern for healthcare providers, they also deal with the stress of working within tight budgets, limited IT resources and strict data privacy rules that are constantly evolving. Hosted solutions can lighten the burden of these issues so that they can do what’s most important – taking care of patients in need.
Dependable Backup and Disaster Recovery
Back it up. Sensitive ePHI (electronic protected health information), along with system state, application files and folders can all be backed up to ensure that when disaster strikes, the data can be properly restored. HostedBizz is a Veeam Partner so our robust backup and recovery solution is based on Veeam engineered technology. Over 12,000 clinicians are already using Veeam backups to protect their data. All backups are stored on HostedBizz’s high performance, 100% Canadian Cloud which enables organizations to meet Federal and Provincial privacy and compliance requirements.
Layered Defense Against Malicious Email Addresses
In both cybercrime cases above, the ransomware was delivered via what seemed to be an innocent email. Hosted anti-spam protects against known malware and is always being updated to ensure protection against the latest threats. HostedBizz Anti-Spam blocks thousands of viruses daily, preventing this malware from reaching the end user. Simply training staff to recognize suspicious emails is not a viable business continuity strategy.
Contact HostedBizz for a full review of your current backup and recovery plan. Our professional services team is very knowledgeable and our suite of hosted cloud solutions will enable you to keep your patient data secure.