How to spot fake MyChart phishing scams and medical bots

Welcome back, everyone. Well, as more patients rely on MyChart just to manage their health, their health care, tech experts are saying that cyber criminals are finding more and more ways to try to exploit these patients through those phishing scams that you might have heard about. We're talking about malicious bot attacks are up nearly 60 percent in the last year. So significant. So joining us now to talk about it, we have Kim Brown with LexisNexis Risk Solutions to talk about what we need to be watching for and how to protect ourselves as well. So, Kim, good morning to you. Thanks for being with us. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Let's dive into this. How can we recognize these fake medical result emails? What do we need to be looking out for? Yeah, so I think the first thing is these fraudsters are counting on the fact that we're busy, where, you know, when we go on our phones to check our emails, we're moving quickly and we're not really slowing down and spending time. So the first thing I always say is when you get one of these emails, Slow down and think about the context. So first of all, are you expecting medical results? Did you recently have some tests done? If you haven't, then that's probably the first red flag that something's off. The next thing you want to do is take a look at the actual email address that the email is coming from. Is it related to your doctor, your provider's office, or does it look like a suspicious email address? And then finally, the link that they're asking you to click. Hover over it so that you can actually see the website that it's directing you to. Is it a legitimate website or is it directing you somewhere else? And if any of these present some type of red flag, immediately contact your provider's office and they can verify whether it's authentic or not. Or you can pull up your browser and go directly to the website or the portal instead of clicking the link. Yeah. I loved your advice too on just slow down, take a beat, right? Breathe for a second before diving in and doing anything. So that's a really good reminder for us. Another one that I want to focus on, you know, so many of us are guilty of reusing passwords. And so when you're talking about doing that over, you know, your healthcare stuff, your banking stuff, that's a huge risk. Yeah, and honestly, it's one that I'm guilty of, but it's such an easy way for fraudsters to gain access to all of our information. Because if you're using the same credentials across passwords, as you just mentioned, your healthcare portals, your banking apps, your insurance, then once your credentials are compromised in one place, that gives the fraudster access across all of those portals, which means they now have all of your information. Yikes. Okay. So that's one of those things we know we shouldn't do it. So maybe today will be the day we do something about it. I'm glad you mentioned that. Let's talk about artificial intelligence and the impact that that is having, if it is, which I imagine it is when it comes to these phishing scams. Yeah, well, I say artificial intelligence is allowing fraudsters to not just do new and more sophisticated schemes, but it's allowing them to be more efficient with some of the traditional schemes like phishing scams. So phishing scams aren't new. They've been around for decades. But what it's allowing them to do now is to perpetrate it at a bigger scale and also to be, as I said, more sophisticated. So when you think about the emails, And the websites that they're redirecting you to, they're looking more and more authentic because they are leveraging these AI capabilities on the back end. You know, this sounds like something that it's up to us to protect ourselves. But on the flip side of this, I mean, what are our health care providers doing to try to protect our portals? Yeah, so we work with a lot of providers. on securing their portals. And so what we do is we provide solutions that help providers verify and authenticate the identities that are coming to access their websites to ensure that it is the genuine patient or consumer. And this is looking at things like digital insights. So the device that's coming to access the website, behavioral insights, how is the consumer or patient interacting with the web? Are they typing in their credentials or copying and pasting, which could be indicative of a fraudster who doesn't know the information as well as, you know, about your personal information. So the names, the addresses, the email addresses are these email addresses we know to be associated with the individual. So we help companies verify and authenticate identities to ensure. That they know who is coming to access their site and it's the genuine consumer or patient. Interesting. One more question before we let you go. Let's say you have a feeling that your MyChart has been compromised. What are the steps that you should take? Well, first report it. So reach out to your provider and let them know because chances are if there was an attack, you weren't the only one affected. So let your provider know. And then, as you just said, change your passwords so that they no longer have access to your account. And if possible, enable multi-factor authentication, which is that solution that we say, you know, you get a text to either your phone or you get an email. It's annoying. We don't like doing it, but it's there to protect you. So if possible, enable the multi-factor authentication. There you go. Some important steps to take, important things to keep in mind when it comes to security and your MyChart. Want to keep that information safe, no doubt. So Kim Brown, LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Kim, thank you so much for the advice. We appreciate it. Thank you.