Urgent Care, Urgent Security: How Fast Pace Health Won Battle Against Phishing and Optimized Defense

INDUSTRY

Healthcare

HEADQUARTERS

Franklin, TN USA

COMPANY SIZE

2,500 employees

OVERVIEW

Fast Pace Health delivers high-quality, accessible, and compassionate healthcare services to rural communities that are often overlooked. Since their inception in 2009 with a single urgent care facility in Collinwood, TN, they have expanded significantly. Today, their network encompasses over 265 healthcare centers spread across Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, and Alabama. They proudly offer a comprehensive range of services including primary care, dermatology, orthopedics, physical therapy, and behavioral health -- all tailored to meet the unique needs of the communities they serve.

OUR SOLUTION

With Infinity XDR and Playblocks we are able to see attacks in real-time and it’s given us the ability to stop attacks in their tracks. It shortens our time to respond significantly. Milinko Milincic, Information Security Architect, Fast Pace Health

Harmony Secure Users & Access

Milinko Milincic, Information Security Architect, Fast Pace Health

Infinity Platform Services Collaborative Security Operations & Services

CHALLENGE

Whether it is ransomware attacks meant to extort, phishing attacks trying to capture login credentials, or attacks motivated to steal personally identifiable health information for profit, healthcare organizations are seeing an increasing number of attacks from threat actors. Milinko Milincic, an Information Security Architect at Fast Pace Health, understands these challenges well. On a daily basis, Milincic works to secure patients’ sensitive and highly regulated healthcare data across two data centers in two states and more than 265 rural locations. However, a tight staff of five working to protect patient data, stop increasingly sophisticated attacks, and maintain HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance is often stretched thin. Maintaining the security and availability of Fast Pace Health’s systems is critical, as a breach could impact thousands of patients who depend on their care delivery network. However, the healthcare provider’s previous security toolsets couldn’t keep up with the evolution of security threats, provide the level of security automation and collaboration, or enable the visibility and reporting into security events the team sought. While Fast Pace Health’s security tools would identify and log many attacks, Milincic explained, they failed to block or adequately report these events. The result? Ongoing and troublesome phishing attacks—often dozens a day. Attackers frequently use phishing attacks to plant malware on user endpoints, and the Fast Pace Health security team had too many malware-infested endpoints to clean up. In addition to dropping malware on endpoints, phishing attacks also steal credentials — and many of these phishing emails targeted management and the finance department, Milincic explained. Milincic and the security team sought a way to stop these credential harvesting attacks, increase their visibility and reporting capabilities regarding security incidents, and automate their response to these security incidents. The security team began its search to meet those capabilities.

We saved a lot of money. We unified our security tooling architecture, and we’re planning to do more.

Check Point Software has enabled us to have total and complete visibility into all the areas that were basically terra incognita for us before.

Milinko Milincic, Information Security Architect, Fast Pace Health

SOLUTION

During their search, the security team gauged several products to find the security platform that would meet Fast Pace Health’s requirements, including conducting a proof-of-concept with Harmony Email & Collaboration. The product delivered. After a straightforward deployment, Harmony Email and Collaboration now protects Fast Pace Healthcare’s entire Microsoft environment, including Microsoft 365, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft OneDrive. Milincic found that Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration provides comprehensive protection for its email, cloud, and collaboration apps, securing inbound, outbound, and internal communications against phishing, malware, business email compromise and credential harvesting attacks.

“Since we installed Harmony Email, we haven’t had a single phishing incident in our organization. Harmony Email & Collaboration is one of those technical solutions that is basically a must for anybody in cybersecurity that cares about email and collaboration security.”

With thousands of devices used across their clinics by medical and business professionals, Fast Pace Health needed comprehensive endpoint protection. The visibility provided by Check Point Harmony Endpoint allows them to monitor all connected devices down to the dongle level, while its Posture Management feature provides visibility into third-party applications as Milincic explained, “previously a blind spot and pain point for security engineers.” The solution’s automated remediation and consolidated management streamlines HIPAA compliance. Additionally, Harmony Endpoint’s threat emulation capabilities automatically sanitize infected files before transmission, ensuring secure file sharing.

Regarding Fast Pace Health’s need to enhance its attack prevention and response capabilities across its environment, the team found its answer with Check Point Infinity Platform, a prevention-first security operations suite. Infinity XDR/XPR provided the team with clear visibility across its endpoints, security tools, and various tech stacks supporting its Microsoft and cloud environments.

“...We were looking for a tool that would enable us to gain visibility,” Milincic said.

Further, Milincic explained how Infinity Playblocks, a security automation and collaboration platform that triggers preventative actions across the healthcare provider’s security infrastructure, enables his five-person security team to automate security actions across their infrastructure.

“Fast Pace Health has a small security team, therefore, we were looking for a solution that would help us automate our responses to incidents, attacks, and events in the network.” That’s precisely what the Check Point Software security solution delivered.

OUTCOME

Milincic and the security team at Fast Pace Healthcare are thrilled with the results they’ve experienced with Check Point Software. “Since installed, we haven’t had a single phishing incident in our organization,” said Milincic. Before Harmony Email & Collaboration Milincic and the team faced dozens of successful phishing attacks a day, many targeting the staff login credentials of executives and the finance department. Through comprehensive endpoint visibility and automated remediation, Check Point Harmony Endpoint empowers Fast Pace Health to protect thousands of devices and maintain HIPAA compliance without compromising on security or operational efficiency. Infinity XDR/XPR and Playblocks automation enabled the security team to deliver effective, proactive security and meet HIPAA compliance. While Fast Pace Health is HIPAA compliant, Check Point helps the healthcare provider to meet that compliance more effectively.

“...It’s giving us visibility, a way to understand the issues and solve them quickly,” Milincic said. Fast Pace Health’s decision to implement Harmony Email & Collaboration and Harmony Endpoint along with Infinity XDR/XPR, supported by Playblocks automation, has dramatically improved the security team’s visibility into security events, the context of attacks needed to remediate the situation swiftly, and the ability to deliver robust and proactive security while also cutting costs from the consolidation of their security tooling.

With Check Point Software, Fast Pace Health is proactively able to secure its data centers and sensitive data for patients, doctors, nurses, and employees across its locations. The consolidation and automation in the platform provide the security team with a deeper understanding of the context of attacks underway, as they consolidated and can now coordinate their security strategy across their network with a single vendor.

“The improvements are immense,” said Milincic. “This is the solution that actually works.”

Consolidating security vendors, Milincic calculates, saved Fast Pace Health about $500,000.

“...It’s cutting our time to understand what’s going on,” Milincic said. “We have great reporting for our C-suite. They can actually see day-to-day operations of the security team and security tooling,” he added. Check Point not only stopped the phishing attacks targeting Fast Pace Health’s staff members, including those aiming for credential theft, improved regulatory compliance, and secured its data centers, endpoints, and Microsoft collaboration tools — it’s done so while reducing budget.

“We saved a lot of money,” Milincic said. “We unified our security tooling architecture, and we’re planning to do more. Check Point Software has enabled us to have total and complete visibility into all the areas that were basically terra incognita for us before.”

ABOUT CHECK POINT

Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (www.checkpoint.com) is a leading AI-powered, cloud-delivered cyber security platform provider protecting over 100,000 organizations worldwide. Check Point leverages the power of AI everywhere to enhance cyber security efficiency and accuracy through its Infinity Platform, with industry-leading catch rates enabling proactive threat anticipation and smarter, faster response times. The comprehensive platform includes cloud-delivered technologies consisting of Check Point Harmony to secure the workspace, Check Point CloudGuard to secure the cloud, Check Point Quantum to secure the network, and Check Point Infinity Core Services for collaborative security operations and services.