Ransomware is targeting vulnerable populations at hospitals. A hospital presents a “perfect storm” for attackers: thousands of apps, a multiplicity of medical equipment connected to the Internet, and sensitive information being stored.

In today’s podcast, Scott Pross applies his healthcare background and technical savvy to offer suggestions to prevent these attacks.

From his background in healthcare, Scott Pross knows that healthcare professionals have a wide variety of applications that they can use. He suggests that a good approach is to interview users to see exactly what applications they constantly use and what ones are relegated to the back shelf. Armed with this knowledge, a systems administrator can prioritize which applications to lock down.

Also, there are several areas to monitor and the approach he suggests is to develop a dashboard system that has areas for topics like the network, Email server, Accounting, and Marketing. This way, managers can get an idea of which systems can be used and which ones should be avoided.

Scott Pross suggests a dashboard system provides three main benefits, especially in a healthcare environment. First, the simplicity of a dashboard could translate IT issues into business issues. Rather than being informed of a specific event in a log, a graphical description could be given to show how that incident would impact the functions of, for example, the Email server. That way, managers could inform staff about issues and resolutions.

Second, because leaders have a visual element in front of them, it stops them from physically going down to the server area to interrupt network administrators doing their work.

Third, information from the dashboard could empower managers to make business decisions. For example, if there were storage issues, a business decision could be made to add storage arrays to eliminate concerns in the future.