How to protect Florida businesses from computer hackers

Hospital hacking

Are you a victim of a hospital hacking attack? | July 30

The government, commercial businesses and medical providers can deploy the latest firewalls, intrusion detection systems and antivirus software, but if they don’t have an up-to-date cybersecurity training program that requires all employees to be trained and tested every six months in recognizing phishing and hacking attacks and how to report them, they are ignoring the prime target of bad actors: humans.

The cybersecurity landscape is constantly changing. An effective security practice is to bring in third-party cybersecurity specialists who can set up half-day training seminars to include sending each employee a phishing email before the training started. Then they can use their responses as an example of what to do and what not to do.

The security program should be updated on a monthly basis to keep up with current hacking and phishing trends. The security team should send emails to all employees warning them about any new attack scenarios, such as compromised webpage portal attacks.

Management and system administrators should focus on role-based access control ensuring that employees don’t have more access to hospital data than is required to do their job. Encrypting data-at-rest will ensure that, even if the data is stolen, it will be useless to the perpetrators. Finally, proper network monitoring of external and internal access based on time of day and user login should be configured to immediately report any abnormal access, especially remote access.

Mark Khan, Tampa

The writer is a certified information systems security professional and a retired senior information assurance officer.

In defense of PragerU

PragerU: Well-documented extremism | Letters, July 29

The ad hominem attack is today’s medium of argument, which is to say there are no real arguments anymore. We simply attack people and entities, leaving issues aside. The letter writer attempts to bolster his attack with credentialism, which says credentials are what matters most when making statements.

Regarding PragerU’s credentials, it doesn’t matter to me if it’s a brick-and-mortar school that’s vetted by the Association of American…