Craig Peterson's Tech Talk

Brockton Hospital was hacked, and Boston television stations spent the morning doing live shots out front. Jim reminds Craig that he called this years ago, predicting health care would become the next big hacking target. Craig lays out why: a hospital licensed for roughly 230 beds is sitting on tens of thousands of patient records, and attackers going after health data usually want one of three things — a ransom payment, the data itself for fraud, or simply chaos. The mechanism Craig comes back to is a business decision, not a technical one: a client tried to save money by hiring a single full-time IT employee instead of outsourcing. It backfired. IT coverage needs at least two people, because someone always needs to be reachable, and roughly 30 percent of an IT person's time goes to ongoing training just to keep pace with attackers who are constantly adopting new tools. The client's own bookkeeper concluded they'd actually been undercharged for outsourced support all along. Also in this segment: A recommend