Hattiesburg Clinic is a multi-specialty ambulatory clinic that has operated since 1963, offering every specialty, except dental. They are located throughout the state of Mississippi with the headquarters in Hattiesburg and 50 satellite facilities across 17 counties. Their mission is to provide quality health care efficiently and cost-effectively, emphasizing excellence and patient service.
Hattiesburg needed to find ways to stop “bad guys” from circumventing existing cybersecurity tools.
Although never having experienced ransomware, Hattiesburg was constantly plagued by malware.
Hattiesburg relied on alert tools and Next Gen AV that could not handle zero-day attacks.
IT staff can save time with ThreatLocker® products that use machine-learning to understand Hattiesburg Clinic’s systems and operations.
Reliable support from the Cyber Hero Support Team, who can elevate tickets easily and respond to urgent chats within 60 seconds.
The ThreatLocker® endpoint protection platform is easy to implement, learn, and tune.
A growing trend in cybersecurity is the rising number of threat actors that can bypass detection tools without triggering them. Jerry Robinson, Director of Information Security at Hattiesburg Clinic shared that even though there were quite a few security tools at their disposal, threat actors were continuously developing ways to circumvent these tools.
“While we never had a ransomware event, or a breach that we know of, we were plagued with malware constantly; and the tools that we had were great at alerting us after the fact, but what I wanted was something that would be more preventive in nature. So, that’s when we began to look at Zero Trust.”
Jerry Robinson had already been taking a high-level look at the idea of implementing Zero Trust into his security strategy prior to being introduced to ThreatLocker® at a tradeshow. After watching a live demonstration of the ThreatLocker® endpoint protection platform, he became excited by what it could do, and put ThreatLocker® on his radar for the following fiscal year.
“But having a piece of software in my environment that would prevent any unauthorized application from running to me seemed like the best solution that one could ask for.”
Out of the approximately 2,000 professional staff at Hattiesburg Clinic, the information security department has roughly 30 employees or just under 1.5% of Hattiesburg's total workforce. Regardless of the size of an organization's information security department, preventing shadow IT and successful phishing attacks is a challenge. Educating users is critical to a successful cybersecurity strategy. However, as Hattiesburg Clinic discovered, you must rely on something other than employee cybersecurity awareness training to protect your organization from phishing attacks, end users installing malicious software, and data breaches caused by unauthorized USB drives.
“It's long been a policy at the clinic, as part of our security policy, that no end user would install software without permission of the IT Department. They're supposed to check with us before they install anything, and we find that rarely happened. From an end user control standpoint, ThreatLocker® has allowed us to get a handle on that.”
After implementing ThreatLocker®, Jerry Robinson stopped end users from installing random programs. Employees must now request any new software and justify its business necessity before the IT Department approves or rejects it. Robinson contributed, “Since you never know what a piece of software is going to do to your computer, being able to control what gets installed is priceless.”
Jerry Robinson shared that his search for a Zero Trust solution lasted about five months prior to discovering ThreatLocker®. During that period, Robinson tried other vendors, but was dissatisfied by the fact that they made rolling out their product more difficult by requiring Hattiesburg Clinic to document everything they were doing.
“I was really excited about ThreatLocker’®s ability to sit back and learn what we do as a normal process and automatically create policies and rules to allow those processes, and just leave us with a list of things to review that we might want to turn off just in case.”
As Jerry Robinson’s information security team became more comfortable with using the ThreatLocker® endpoint protection platform, they no longer needed the help of the Cyber Hero Support Team as much as they did upon initially onboarding. However, when they did need support, the Cyber Hero Support Team was always available.
“In the first year, we probably had bi-weekly calls with a dedicated engineer just to review where we were, what issues we were having, and provide solutions, if they were needed, to answer any questions. We've commented amongst ourselves, ‘Not many vendors would go that distance to provide that level of support,’ and [the Cyber Hero Support Team] is just extremely knowledgeable and very helpful every time we get together.”
The idea of falling victim to a cyberattack, specifically ransomware, can be nerve-racking. Nonetheless, when discussing how he personally measures success, as opposed to using metrics or KPIs, Jerry Robinson claims “The measurement for me is my level of comfort and ability to sleep at night.”
Hattiesburg Clinic’s goal moving forward is to expand into other markets where there are inadequate healthcare services available to those that need them. ThreatLocker®’s role in ensuring the success of this plan is by protecting Hattiesburg Clinic, and the data of their employees, partners, and most importantly, their patients. Jerry Robinson believes that Threatlocker is what brings his cybersecurity strategy together, making this goal possible by removing an obstacle as intimidating as cyberattacks.
“I liken my security offering to a pie. And, you know, there are several slices that make up the entire pie. ThreatLocke®r is a huge part of that; probably one of the bigger slices. If we didn’t have Threatlocker®, that would be a huge gap. Somewhere, you have to draw a line and say, 'this is enough,’ and I think ThreatLocker® helps us in drawing that line. Will it get rid of any of the other tools? Probably not. But would I trust my security pie to just the other tools? No.”
ThreatLocker® gives Hattiesburg the ability to protect the secure data of everyone in their systems with granular Zero Trust controls. By implementing ThreatLocker®’s default deny policies, or only allowing what is needed and blocking everything else, Hattiesburg Clinic can pursue their business development free from the influence of cybercriminals and the damage their malicious plans cause.
