Vituity Protects Patients’ Data and Doctors’ Time with Abnormal

Vituity supports continuous innovation in healthcare by helping hospitals reduce costs, improve care quality, increase operational efficiency, connect with their communities, and improve patient flow through the care process. Vituity has more than 5,000 clinicians serving in 450 practice locations, providing their partner hospitals with critical care, neurology, psychiatry, and other practice specialties.

“Healthcare data is a prime target for adversaries, so attackers are always looking for ways in,” said Jeff McDonald, Senior Vice President of Technology Services. “Our main concern right now is business email compromise, ransomware, and account takeover attacks that can lead to a lateral spread within our email environment.”

Even with native email security tools available in Microsoft 365 and a secure email gateway, spear phishing and other malicious messages were reaching executive, physician, and employee inboxes. The security team manually remediated these reported attacks, but the time required raised the risk that a recipient would engage before the threat was addressed.

“Email threats don’t just put our company at risk. They also endanger our patients’ privacy, safety, and potentially their lives. Abnormal has helped us secure the most significant vector putting our patient data at risk.”
—Jeff McDonald, Senior Vice President of Technology Services

To solve the problem, McDonald wanted a security layer that could evolve with the threat landscape. “Adversaries are changing from year to year and toolset to toolset, and we have to shift constantly as well. Our school of thought is if attackers now are using sophisticated techniques like AI, we should be using AI to combat that.”

He also wanted an API-based solution for quick deployment and integration. Abnormal met both requirements. “When we learned about Abnormal, we were surprised that it fit exactly how we needed it to. We didn’t need to replace our security stack, and we could set it up in five minutes,” McDonald said.

The Abnormal setup was seamless and the results were quick, said Donato Cabal, Director of Information Security. “Abnormal was catching many messages that our existing security tools were missing. It really surprised us how effective Abnormal was.” McDonald agreed: “Our existing tools filtered out a lot of mass-generated attacks but let the scariest problems go right through. Abnormal is exactly what we needed.”

The Abnormal Threat Log gives Cabal and his team better visibility into attack trends, and Cabal also checks the statistics on blocked graymail messages as Vituity rolls out Email Productivity. McDonald said the executive test group’s response has been positive because it saves them time and also helps reduce background noise that can mask threats.

“Abnormal has helped us meet our security requirements by effectively remediating malicious emails. With the time Abnormal saves us on manual investigation and remediation, my team now spends more time focused on other potential areas of compromise and working on an infinite number of security projects across other areas of the organization.”
—Donato Cabal, Head of Information Security

Abnormal’s approach to security is a good fit for Vituity’s innovation-focused mindset. McDonald views Abnormal as an effective solution for email security now and a potential resource for security issues in the future. “We're excited to see what new products are on the horizon as Abnormal expands its portfolio of AI and ML solutions, and to see how our current security can be augmented with next-generation techniques and tooling.”