How to Prevent Ransomware at Senior Healthcare Facilities

Hi, my name is Ephraim. I’m with FIT Solutions, and I’d like to show you how you can prevent ransomware at your skilled nursing facility, at your assisted living, any kind of senior care health—this is how you prevent it.

Have you perhaps been impacted before? Just last month, over 110 operators were down for over eight days; it was huge news in the industry. It caused a lot of problems because the nurses couldn’t get to electronic healthcare records due to ransomware. In fact, in that case, the ransom was $14 million. The IT company that was held ransom that impacted these wasn’t able to pay the ransom, so all data was lost. That included email addresses, all their emails, all their files, basically everything, so it was a big disaster.

What can you do about it? The first thing you going to want to do is make sure you have good endpoint protection. So this is a little bit more than antivirus because it goes a little deeper, it doesn’t just work on definitions, it’s able to identify things and prevent it. I’m sure you probably already have endpoint protection.

The next one is free, and this is what most companies don’t have. In fact, when a company applies it—we’ve actually not had a company that’s applied it and gotten ransomware yet. (Knock on wood—it could still happen.)

But what we recommend is putting a Group Policy Object in place that prevents executables from running in a temporary file location. I know that was probably super techie and geeky; I apologize for that, but all ransomware has one thing in common, which is that it runs an executable file from a temporary file location. Most legitimate applications, with some exceptions, don’t have to do that.

Now if there is an exception, you can create an exception and still apply this Group Policy Object. If you click the link below, we can email you a GPO that does this for free. You simply need to import it and apply it to the computers. We just rolled it out last week to over 2,000 endpoints. Not one hiccup! If there is a hiccup, we’re happy to talk about how to adjust the policy so it’s not a big deal. In any case, this is super helpful information, and if you’d like to have a conversation about IT, reach out, click the link below, and I’ll speak with you personally.