Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital Stops Ransomware in its Tracks, Takes Control of its Data with Varonis

NEW YORK, Sept. 08, 2016 -- Varonis Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRNS), a leading provider of software solutions that protect data from insider threats and cyberattacks, today released details on how Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital, recently named one of America’s “Most Wired” hospitals, relies on Varonis solutions to control the security of its data.

Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital, which serves patients in the Yadkin Valley region of North Carolina and Virginia, employs more than 800 people, provides healthcare services for the community and is served by more than 70 physicians representing 26 specialties and subspecialties. The IT team’s search for the right solution led to the evaluation and implementation of Varonis Data Classification Framework, DatAdvantage for Exchange and Windows, and DatAlert.

Alerting on Ransomware Attacks

Lee Powe, Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital’s CIO, said, “A week into our implementation we had a brush with ransomware. One of the employees remotely connected and went on a site that started downloading Locky. Luckily the Varonis rules we had in place immediately told me when the individual started encrypting the file, so we disabled the account and restored the files. Without Varonis we would have ended up with a much broader exposure of the breach and the result would have been a lot worse.”

With DatAdvantage and DatAlert in place, Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital can easily identify who has access to which files, when they access those files and set triggers for any unusual activity, particularly for ransomware threat activity like mass encryptions. By increasing its security and preventing ransomware, Varonis has not only improved the hospital’s overall security posture, it also means the IT team doesn’t have to spend days recovering data.

Implementing a Least Privilege Model

With the Data Classification Framework, Varonis was able to help Hugh Chatham Memorial discover sensitive content within its environment, see who had access to what, and help lock down access without interrupting the businesses workflow.

“We completely cleaned up the security of more than a terabyte of network file shares,” said Powe. “Seeing the results of the changes was huge. In any organization but specifically in a hospital, the end user's tolerance for change is pretty low. If you have nine hundred or a thousand users and only 5 or 10 of them are actually accessing the data available in an everyone group, it becomes a no-brainer.”

Compliance and E-Discovery Requests

Powe added, “When I receive a compliance request for a report on a particular user and their file activity over a specific period of time, it takes me less than a minute to run. Before Varonis, it would have taken hours and hours going through log files to try and compile a user's activity in relation to network file shares.”

Additional Resources

• Read the Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital case study here.
• For more information on Varonis' solution portfolio, please visit www.varonis.com
• Visit our blog, and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

About Varonis
Varonis is a leading provider of software solutions that protect data from insider threats and cyberattacks. Through an innovative software platform, Varonis allows organizations to analyze, secure, manage, and migrate their volumes of unstructured data. Varonis specializes in file and email systems that store valuable spreadsheets, word processing documents, presentations, audio and video files, emails, and text. This rapidly growing data often contains an enterprise’s financial information, product plans, strategic initiatives, intellectual property, and confidential employee, customer or patient records. IT and business personnel deploy Varonis software for a variety of use cases, including data security, governance and compliance, user behavior analytics, archiving, search, and file synchronization and sharing. With offices and partners worldwide, Varonis had approximately 4,800 customers as of June 30, 2016, spanning leading firms in financial services, healthcare, public, industrial, insurance, energy and utilities, media and entertainment, consumer and retail, technology and education sectors.

News Media Contact:
Sarah Wheble
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