ER Tech’s Cybersecurity Tech Company of Choice: CrowdStrike

If you’ve been in the healthcare industry for as long as our team has (we started way back 1998), you know what we mean when we say data protection is no joke. 

When you’re an organization that handles protected health information (PHI), you can be sure that countless cyber criminals looking to sell your clinic data in the dark web are eyeing your IT network for an opportunity to exploit any weakness.

One wrong move involving data security, whether accidental or malicious, can affect your finances, reputation, and HIPAA compliance status. With so much at stake, you need to entrust your precious clinic data to the best in the cybersecurity technology industry. 

For ER Tech Pros, that’s CrowdStrike.

What is CrowdStrike?

CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity technology company that specializes in securing the organization’s most critical areas of risk: endpoints and cloud workloads, identity, and data. Their products can be installed on Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems for desktop and server platforms.

CrowdStrike offers robust, cloud-hosted cybersecurity solutions that can manage prevention policies, generate reporting data, and immediately act on cybersecurity threats.

Powered by machine learning, CrowdStrike’s products are designed to ensure that their customers are ahead of adversaries and that breaches are stopped before they occur.

Why CrowdStrike is ER Tech’s Cyber Protection of Choice

The simple answers to this would be:

• They’re the best in the industry.
• Their services come in bundles that cater to every organization’s unique needs. 
• Zero-hassle deployment. You install them and just let them do their thing.

It's also very important to note that in an executive order issued early this year, the White House urges government agencies and private institutions to work together to improve the nation's cybersecurity.

CrowdStrike is one of the platforms chosen by the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to support the initiative. Its CrowdStrike Falcon platform will be used to "secure critical endpoints and workloads for CISA and multiple other major civilian agencies."

If you’re looking for a more technical explanation to why we’re partnering with CrowdStrike, though, we’ve listed down five of our favorite services below:

Next-generation Antivirus (NGAV)

Since the 1980s, antivirus (AV) solutions have used a more reactive approach to defending against malware and viruses. A traditional antivirus solution’s detection strategy depends on identifying strings of characters—also known as signatures—that are associated with certain types of malware. Once detected, the traditional antivirus blocks the attack and prevents similar threats in the future.

Unfortunately, this method is fast becoming obsolete because cybercriminals have found ways around the traditional AV’s defenses. 

This is where the NGAV steps in. Instead of relying on a limited and difficult-to-update signature database, the NGAV solution uses a combination of artificial intelligence (AI), behavioral detection, machine learning algorithms, and exploit mitigation to provide protection against known and unknown threats.

CrowdStrike’s NGAV, Falcon Prevent, boasts:

• BETTER PROTECTION against all types of attacks with a single solution. It ensures protection even when offline.
• FAST & EASY DEPLOYMENT ensures that it is fully operational in seconds. No signatures, fine-tuning, or expensive infrastructure are required.
• OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE from day one. It employs a single, lightweight agent that is unobtrusive in nature and has a minimal impact on the endpoint.

Automated Threat Intelligence

A threat intelligence platform’s purpose is to enable organizations to get ahead of attackers by detecting the presence of threats, blocking and tackling cyber attacks, or bringing down their infrastructure.

An example of threat intelligence in action would be when one of your clinic staff downloads an infected file on your office computer. When someone tries to run that file, they are likely to encounter an error as well as a pop-up notification stating that the process was blocked because of malicious behavior. Traditional threat intelligence solutions typically stop there. 

However, CrowdStrike’s automated threat intelligence solution, Falcon X, goes the extra mile. It automatically runs a prevention event and malware analysis to provide richer context to your threat investigation.

The information that Falcon X provides allows you to properly assess an attack, understand the risks it poses, and ultimately make more effective cybersecurity decisions.