A Houston story
The Tuesday a Katy dental practice got its nineteen years back by lunch
the owner-dentist of a two-chair practice on Mason Road in Katy
It is 7:05 on a Tuesday in August, already 84 degrees, and the first patient is a crown prep at 7:30. The owner-dentist opened on Mason Road nineteen years ago with one chair and a loan. Nineteen years of charts, X-rays and ledgers live on the server in the closet behind the sterilization room.
The remote-access tool on that server had a flaw the vendor fixed in June. Nobody installed the fix, because nobody knew there was one. At 3:40 that morning someone in another time zone found the open door, walked in, and started encrypting.
The hygienist logs in at 7:12 and the schedule will not load.
The screen shows a note instead of the day's schedule, and nineteen years of patient records are on the other side of it.
The agent on the server had already cut the encryption off at 3:41 and woken an engineer, not the dentist. By 7:20 the engineer is on the phone. The offline backup from midnight restores the database by 11:15. The crown prep runs late. The 1:00 patient never knows. The breach analysis shows the copying was stopped before a single record left the building.
What changes the ending
- An offline, tested backup of the practice-management database that restores in hours, not the weeks a rebuild takes (CIS 11 Data Recovery).
- Patching the remote-access tool and the server the week the fix ships, because unpatched flaws are now the number one way in (CIS 7 Continuous Vulnerability Management).
- A protection agent on the server that stops encryption at 3:41 a.m. and wakes an engineer, not the dentist (CIS 10 Malware Defenses).