Perspective from Harry-Jacques Pierre: The Rasky Crisis Team spends more and more time these days working in the health care sphere, often helping health care providers address issues of data privacy and HIPPA violations. We’ve been fortunate to work with several of the best data breach attorneys in the business who help their clients and ours keep up with the fast moving…

The Rasky Crisis Team spends more and more time these days working in the health care sphere, often helping health care providers address issues of data privacy and HIPPA violations. We’ve been fortunate to work with several of the best data breach attorneys in the business who help their clients and ours keep up with the fast moving changes in reporting requirements, which just manage to keep up with advances in technology. And we’ve heard countless industry experts advise that everyone is vulnerable to attack. To say that we’ve probably seen it all would be an understatement, but something that happened yesterday even shocked us.

This week it’s believed that the international hacker group Anonymous attacked the website and computer network of Boston’s Children’s Hospital, putting both the operations and the data of patients and medical personnel at risk in an effort to punish Children’s Hospital for having, in its view, mishandled the custody case of Justina Pelletier.

Public safety officials have warned for several years that America should prepare and be on guard against a major cyber-attack, and it has been anticipated that they would attempt to bring down either the financial sector or infrastructure systems (electricity for example).

Anonymous attacked MasterCard, PayPal and Visa around the WikiLeaks event. But a cyber-attack in the healthcare industry should be a major wake-up call to hospitals and all health care medical providers. Hospitals can no longer think that this will never happen to them.

The risk to hospitals and medical records in particular is great given the vast cyber-infrastructure many of these institutions have. From network storage and data flow, to the servers, computers and other devices that hold information it’s imperative that every aspect of your network be protected. Everyone in the organization from the CEO, IT Director and legal counsel to department heads and frontline employees should be educated on the proper safeguards to secure information.

It is time to update those security protocols and systems, and bring your team in to update the crisis plan. Today.