The McLernons team were delighted to be asked to give a presentation at the recent National Pharmacy Association (NPA) Members Event in Northern Ireland last week.

We work closely with WatchGuard, who offer a range of products and services to help protect our customers’ networks, devices and data, and asked their engineer Martin Lethbridge to give an overview of the Threat Landscape 2024.

Some of the statistics that he shared with the pharmacists in the room included:

• Around 65000 attempts to hack small- to medium-sized businesses occur in the UK every day
• 48% of UK organisations were hit by ransomware in the last year
• Around half of cyberattacks in the UK involve phishing
• Healthcare breaches are increasing

Perhaps the most frightening piece of information that he shared was the comment “It’s not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’. There is no silver bullet defense against cyber attack.”

WatchGuard help McLernons help their customers by suggesting multiple layers of security – such as Firewalls, Antivirus, Antispam, reputation services – which will give them a higher chance that one of the additional layers can catch an advanced threat other layers might miss.

He also stressed that passwords are a particularly weak point which can provide easy access to cyber hackers to access your patient data and business information.

McLernons are happy to carry out an IT security review with you and suggest a number of ways you can help protect your business from malicious software attacks.

Are you guilty of any of the following?

• Using a ‘free’ unsecure email account?
• Allowing unfiltered web access on your pharmacy systems?
• Using Default System Passwords?
• Using unsupported and obsolete Windows Operating Systems?
• Using Legacy Hardware?
• Using inadequate Anti-virus software?
• Lacking a hardware firewall?
• Using open or unsecure WiFi?
• Lacking staff cyber security training?

If you have answered ‘yes’ to any of these then your IT systems are at risk from cyber attack. Contact us immediately on ‘[email protected]’