In 2012, a faculty member at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, part of the University of Texas, discovered that his home had been robbed. A laptop lost in the robbery contained 30,000 unencrypted patient medical records including patient health information and Social Security numbers. In addition to informing those whose information had been lost, M.D. Anderson offered free credit monitoring to anyone affected by the breach. Also, under new HITECH regulations, health care organizations like M.D. Anderson could face up to $1.5 million per privacy violation.

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Every time you turn on your computer connected to internet you are prone to security threat from the hackers who are constantly on the prowl to get sensitive information such as customer personal data, trade secrets or bank account numbers. The news about security breaches and hacking attacks have become daily affair. At times it seems the only way to prevent such attacks is to move to a remote island without any internet connection.

As tempting as this may sound, however, the reality is you cannot live without connecting your computer to internet these days. A more realistic approach is to ensure you are taking steps to shield your computer and network from external threats.

Two primary ways by which you can ensure protection from security threats are prevention and remediation. As you can imagine prevention is always a preferred approach since by the time you have to do remediation it may already be too late. The tools that are used to assess your systems to prevent such attacks fall in 3 categories – security audits, vulnerability assessment and penetration testing.

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