Petya, WannaCry and the Security of Your Medical Transcription System

Recent cyber-attacks that have many health care providers very concerned. Some have had to revert to backup documentation methodologies. At 2Ascribe, our transcription service, powered by VoiceWare, is essentially immune to Trojan horses, viruses and ransomware because our system does not use standard Internet ports. If your medical practice depends on top notch security and dependability, call us and we can get you going within the day.

Ransomware, phishing and DNS attacks are on a dramatic rise. It is well known that recent cyber security attacks hit sites in over 100 countries. These kinds of attacks exploit weaknesses inherent in mainstream operating systems and network standards. The recent Petya and WannaCry attacks affected hundreds of thousands of computers, putting data on these computers at significant risk. Are you concerned that it is only a matter of time before an attack might affect your healthcare practice? You do have options.

Here is the technical part: You can protect your critical assets, including your client’s personal health information, by removing them from the hackers’ “playground”. 99% of Web users communicate with web servers on either Internet port 80 or port 443. 95% of users access those sites with one of only five different browsers; over 95% of web servers run on one of only three web server platforms. This commonality provides a well-defined and easy-to-spot target for hackers. A single well-placed attack can take out a majority of users.

At 2Ascribe, we have the most secure dictation and transcription application server available. We are secure against port 80 and port 443 attacks because our transcription platform, VoiceWare, simply doesn’t use or allow use of those ports. We are secure against attacks from web browsers because our servers cannot be accessed from a web browser. We are secure from all attacks aimed at Web server environments such as IIS, Apache and nGinx (the top three examples), because our servers do not use a web server environment, at all. Period.

One of the major cloud transcription services providers who was affected by the latest virus attack, Petya, had this to say to their clients yesterday (June 29th, 2017):

“And officials said customers may also choose to implement an alternative dictation service.”

They also suggested customers could revert to handwriting their patient notes.

At 2Ascribe, we don’t believe that physicians should have to handwrite their notes until someone else’s hacking problem gets fixed.

2Ascribe Inc. is a medical transcription services agency located in Toronto, Ontario Canada, providing medical transcription services to physicians, clinics and other healthcare providers across Canada and the US.  Having recently introduced WEBscribe, a client interface portal for document management, 2Ascribe continues to implement and develop technology to assist and improve the transcription process for physicians and other healthcare providers.  As a service to our clients and the healthcare industry, 2Ascribe offers articles of interest to physicians and other healthcare professionals, medical transcriptionists and office staff, as well as of general interest.  Additional articles may be found at https://www.2ascribe.com.

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