Important information like your billing, health history and conditions, credit card numbers, and inventory levels can be stolen. Viruses and malware can corrupt your computer systems and leave you paralyzed for weeks causing you to lose business and look bad to potential clients. Having an active cyber security system can protect you and keep your facility and client info safe.
The Definition Of Cyber Security
When you and your staff take measures to protect every part of your computer systems attached to the Internet from outside attacks is called cyber security. This typically comes from software that counters viruses and malware, encryption, passwords, and significant diligence. Cyber security is a critical part of an IT department and a quickly growing profession.
What Cyber Security Prevents
While you can explain what is cybersecurity it is even more difficult to explain how your systems are threatened. External sources use coding to break into networks through the internet. Specialists can set up firewalls and other barriers to stop them and hack into the system themselves to check for signs of vulnerability. Malware, such as viruses and spyware, can harm a single computer. Phishing is emails that look like they came from a legitimate source but are searching out for your information. When an outside source locks up your files and demands money to release them, this is called ransomware. These sorts of problems and others infect networks through infected flash drives or corrupted ads, websites, and even games.
Why You Need To Implement Security Measures
The internet landscape changes on a daily basis. While engineers design improvements to make information exchanges faster and more efficient, those who wish to use the data for their own benefit are also adapting. You want to institute defenses to these attacks that are proactive rather than reactive. Waiting to be hacked to implement your security will eventually catch up to your company leaving you vulnerable. Your cyber security team should be constantly studying what threats are potentially out there and what you can do to stop them from harming your business. Your cyber security team can do this by updating the software that is installed whenever a new one is issued, educating employees about what emails and websites to avoid, and staying up-to-date on their own training. It is also prudent to have staff change their passwords on a regular basis and discourage them to bring their personal equipment from home and attaching it to your company’s system. Employees should also be discouraged from using easy to guess passwords, short passwords, or a password they’re already using for another purpose or website.
Careers in Cyber Security
No matter how big or small your doctor’s company is, every medical facility should have at least one IT/Security position at all times. If you are a smaller facility, you will want to appoint someone to keep your antivirus software up to date and to oversee the rest of your staff to ensure they are staying away from infected emails and websites. You can also hire an outside, independent consultant if you feel you need more help that your worker can provide. If your company employs many people and handles sensitive information, you will want to hire a full department.
A specific career is the Chief Information Security Officer, who will oversee those in cyber security and act as a liaison between those in the department and the management. A Security Architect builds up the multiple defenses against threats and puts them into place. A Security Analyst watches for potential threats and studies the multiple avenues that danger can enter the system. You can also hire or appoint one of these employees to be an Ethical Hacker who will use code to attempt to break into your network then report the vulnerabilities that they find. If you do get hacked and your information is compromised, you will need an Information Security Crime/Forensic Expert to gather evidence and work with law officials to determine who did it so they can be brought to justice.
