Nothing makes doctors cringe more than someone blurting the acronym HIPPA.  What is HIPPA and why should I care, after all I am a doctor for heaven’s sake!  While that statement is often tossed around in casual conversations among peers, the underlying majority sentiment among the medical community is that it scares all healthcare principals to the bone.  The cost of a single HIPPA violation is astronomical and can literally put a small healthcare practice out of business.

So you’ve heard of Viruses and Phishing attacks, but have you heard of Ransomware? Ransomware is basically a combination of a virus and phishing attack that employs an application to encrypt your data to hold it for ransom. The phishing part of the attack is centered on an email with some type of attachment. An example would be “My Resume for your consideration” with a word document attached. The Word document has macros that will go out to the Internet, download and run an application that will search for and encrypt all of your data files (PDF, Office App files, photos, etc).

This process can come in handy if you use offline folders. The problem I ran into was that the previous host was removed without all the clients being able to sync. Thus, I was left with orphaned Offline Files that were pointing to the old host. The best way to retrieve these files is to take the following steps.