Digital Security: It Isn’t About Protecting Your Fingers

A colleague recently emailed to warn me that his account had been compromised. If I received any strange messages from him—links, attachments, requests—I should not open them. He had secured the account and was working to contain the damage. I felt sympathy. Digital crime, and all the resulting hassles, actively interferes with my life on a daily basis.

Working in a very large hospital system that is a juicy target for ransom attacks, security is critical for my bosses. We have training, passwords, keycards, and 2-factor authentication. It is time consuming and a bother. Living in our digital world makes a lot of things more efficient. The accompanying security issues are an annoyance.

Dermatology practices may be much smaller than the behemoth I work at, but perhaps not too small to be targets. Our practices may be rich in personal data and busy enough to prioritize patient care over security measures. A reused password, a staff member who trusts a caller claiming to be from IT, a finger click on a convincing invoice—maybe it is about fingers after all—and suddenly the records of thousands of patients could be encrypted by ransomware or sent drifting across the dark web.

In this issue, Dr Daniel M. Siegel gives his perspective on technology in dermatology, and he discusses the importance of security and practical measures we should consider. Turning on multifactor authentication everywhere, using a password manager so every login is unique, training and retraining staff to distrust urgency because urgency is a con artist’s tool, and keeping secure offline backups are some of the ways we can protect ourselves and our patients’ information.

The digital landscape has some landmines. Be prepared. But do remember to have a great day. It is still the best time ever!