Two Things Senior Care Facilities, Assisted Living, and Post-Acute Need to Be Cyber Secure

Hi, my name is Ephraim with FIT Solutions, and I’d like to share with you two things that you can do to protect your senior care facility, whether that’s a SNF or assisted living, help protect it from a cybersecurity breach. And the best part? It’s free.

We’re finding that the majority of cyber breaches are happening via email or ransomware. Those are the top two. It’s not the only two, but definitely the top two. So what can you do about this?

The first thing you can do is enable what’s called multi-factor authentication. You’ve probably heard about it. If you haven’t heard about it, I’m sure you’ve used it, at least on your banking websites. Maybe you try to log into your bank and you notice that it texts you a code that you then have to enter because it doesn’t know it’s you. So you can enable this on all your applications in your environment, but the most important to at least get started is your Office 365 or your G Suite for your email because that’s the number one target that criminals are trying to get after, and they can get in pretty easily. They can trick an employee into clicking a link and getting them in, or they can buy stolen credentials on the dark web, which is also very common. So enabling this in your Office 365 will make it way better. It’s not too cumbersome as well; it’s not going to text you every time you log in. It’s only going to do it when you’re logging in from a new device or a new location, so it’s not too bad.

The second one is to prevent ransomware. You’re going to want to have good endpoint protection or antivirus, and this is not a replacement for that. But there’s another layer you can do that’s highly effective and it’s free of charge. It’s called a GPO, which stands for Group Policy Object. You import this and it enforces a policy on your computers. All ransomware have one thing in common, which is it runs an executable from a temporary location to execute, and that’s not how most programs that are legitimate operate. Now if there is a legitimate program that needs to do that, it’s easy to make an exception. What you’ll want to do is take a group policy that prevents EXEs from executing in these temporary files and prevent that on all of your workstations.

Now if you click the link below, if you don’t have a policy like this, just email us; we’ll email you one for free that you can then just import. No pressure, it’s really easy to do. And we’ll do that for you. We’d love to have an IT discussion with you about making your environment more streamlined and reducing downtime. Click the link; we’ll have a conversation.