Installation guide

5
Security breaches cost you
According to the 2004 Australian Computer Crime and Security Survey by the Australian Computer
Emergency Response Team (AUSCERT), the key computer security trends in Australia are:
• 95% of respondents reported experiencing computer security incidents in the past 12
months, with the majority of organisations experiencing between one and five incidents.
• the number of respondents experiencing attacks that harmed the confidentiality, integrity and
availability of networks, data or systems increased from 42% in 2003 to 49% in 2004.
• the average financial loss per incident was $116 212.
• 88% of attacks originate from external sources.
• 13% of respondents reported that hackers had penetrated their systems.
The full survey results are at www.auscert.org.au
Security breaches compromise your practice
It is easy for intruders to gain full control over unprotected computers connected to the Internet. An intruder's
primary goal may not be the data you have stored on your computer. They may want to use your system to
deliver spam mail for example. However, your data is still at risk of being compromised.
Most computers in medical practice store confidential patient data. Even if a compromised computer doesn't
store confidential data, it can potentially be used to access the rest of the practice network or even other
health networks that your practice connects to.
If a computer is connected to the Internet, even only temporarily, a firewall is essential. It is possible for an
attack to occur in very little time and at any hour of the day. Such attacks may not be obvious to the user.
What other computer security do you need?
Firewalls don’t stop all threats
One of the most reputable network security institutions, SANS (the SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security
Institute), regularly publishes lists of the worst mistakes people make that lead to security breaches – see
www.sans.org/resources/mistakes.php.
According to SANS, one of the worst mistakes made by Senior Executives that leads to security breaches
is to rely primarily on a firewall. A firewall is considered a first line of defence in protecting private information
against network attacks. While firewalls can be configured to filter certain types of traffic, which does not
necessarily mean they stop all threats. For instance, firewalls may let through an email irrespective of who
sent the email and whether or not it contains a virus.
There are trade-offs between the level of filtering and the need to allow application services to pass through.
An attacker may still be able to compromise your internal systems using application traffic, which you allow
to pass through the firewall. For example, some worm programs can infect your computer via HTTP, which
is the communications protocol used for Internet browsing and web-based applications.