Editor’s Page: Protecting the Good Guys

You could hear it in his voice. The anxiety, frustration and outright exhaustion was palpable when a conference attendee discussed his surgery center’s experience with ransomware during the Q&A portion of a cybersecurity presentation led by this issue’s cover story author, Gary Salman.

The attendee’s surgery center was dealing with a data breach and ransomware nightmare that no doubt caught everyone involved off guard. Mr. Salman, however, appeared unfazed by what the attendee described — which makes sense. He works with cybercrime victims every day, and he’s heard countless stories like the one that brave attendee shared with his peers.

As accustomed as he has become to horror stories from organizations of all types — with plenty of surgery centers in the mix — Mr. Salman is far from apathetic about the inevitability of cybercrime.

Quite the opposite.

He is relentless in his quest to help healthcare organizations better protect themselves from cyberattacks. Mr. Salman wants to get the word out and he’s using platforms like this magazine to warn anybody who will listen about the reality of this dire existential threat. As he says in our cover story, “All facilities will be a victim of a cyberattack.”

If you think your center is too small to be targeted, think again. As Mr. Salman explains, the rules have changed with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI).

But if AI if a game changer for the bad guys, it can just as easily be used to help the good guys — the men and women whose focus needs to be reserved for providing the best possible care for patients — stay safe.

Cybersecurity should be a top concern for your organization, and protection requires a paradigm shift in thinking and an overhaul of the old defense strategies.

Luckily, my parent company, AORN, is just as obsessed with cybersecurity as Mr. Salman. The amount of phishing tests this organization sends out to keep employees on their toes is rivaled only by the number of cybersecurity updates and trainings it holds. Seriously, they must have taken their cues from NerdWallet (if anyone reading is from that company, “Unsubscribe” means “Unsubscribe”) when it comes to the sheer amount of emails they send us.

I can’t even tell you how often I grumbled about these phishing tests and questioned how sadistic our IT department needed to be to maintain the all-out blitz on our inboxes.

And don’t even ask what I said on the rare occasion they tricked me into clicking where I wasn’t supposed to.

But you know what? After Mr. Salman’s presentation, I looked at our IT department in an entirely different light. I’m grateful that we’re doing what we’re supposed to do with all the terrifying threats to data that are lurking out there around every corner of the Dark Web. Hackers are banking on organizations not taking proper precautions to safeguard their data.

I hope that the cybersecurity story that anchors this issue, which also includes a Special Section on Ophthalmology, a fantastic urology piece, a Business Advisor column framed by, of all things, a Rubik’s cube, and the return of our witty new humor columnist, Carson McCafferty — awakens or renews your focus in preventing cyberattacks, because it really is a top priority issue for all. OSM