With so many big names in business and industry revealing that they’ve been hacked, despite all their resources to combat this type of behavior, owners of all small businesses, yes even dental practices, need to be especially vigilant regarding their own security and file sharing measures to avoid the nightmare a hacking event presents to their businesses.
A recent survey on Information Security in American Business revealed that 73 percent of American office workers were concerned hackers could gain access to personal information such as home addresses, birth dates, and social security numbers. Further, 61 percent believed that corporations weren’t doing an adequate job of cyber security grading corporations at C or worse.Bad file sharing habits are part of the problem. Is your dental office guilty of these five risky file sharing habits?
- Using email to share files. It seems innocent enough, but email is not at all secure. People often have a false sense of security when it comes to email security. The problem is that there is no viable method to deliver widespread email security within the scope of current technology.
- Failing to establish file-sharing policies. The survey mentioned above also addresses this by indicating that only 11 percent of workers who do not send work files through their personal email accounts are aware of dental practice policies preventing the practice. It’s not enough to simply establish the policies, though, you must also educate your employees about the reasons the policies exist.
- Allowing employees to use Peer-to-Peer (P2P) services. P2P services allow anyone to share files over their networks, including hackers. Many files these services share are riddled with malware, and other avenues that allow hackers to breach your security.
- Using flash drives. Flash drives bypass all security protocols most networks have in place. One infected file on a flash drive compromises the entire network of your dental practice. Unfortunately, that’s just the beginning. Flash drives are small making them easy to lose, misplace, or steal. When sensitive dental office information is stored on these drives, it’s far too easy for it to fall into the wrong hands.
- Using personal file sharing services. Google Drive and Drop Box are two of the biggest personal file sharing services today. They are easy to use and widely used, but they may not be the as secure of a venue for practice-related sharing files as other dedicated, multi-layered encryption enterprise sharing platforms are. For dental practice file sharing, look into Office 365, Citrix, Symantic, Egnyte, Hightail, and Box for example.
Finally, it’s up to dental practice owners to provide adequate monitoring, supervision, and oversight of employee file-sharing habits. In this day and age when more dental employees are bringing their own devices into the workplace and bringing their work home with them, dental practices must work harder than ever before to keep up with the security needs of practice, customer, and employee information.