Cybersecurity for veterinary practices.
Your practice runs on its PIMS. We keep it running — ransomware-ready protection for Cornerstone, AVImark, ezyVet and every system you depend on, plus your client data, your payments, and your team. Built for practices without an IT department.
Practice cyber checklist controls covered
Monitoring and incident response
PIMS, email, and admin logins
Starting plan for a single-location practice
The Blind Spot
“We're not HIPAA-regulated” is not the same as “we're safe”.
Veterinary medicine has no HIPAA equivalent, and that absence has quietly convinced a lot of practice owners that cybersecurity is someone else's problem. It isn't. Three things make a practice exposed regardless of whether a regulator is watching.
One: your practice cannot operate without its PIMS. Cornerstone, AVImark, ezyVet — whatever you run, it holds your schedule, your patient records, your controlled-substance logs, and your billing. Ransomware that encrypts it doesn't slow the practice down; it stops the practice. Attackers know this, and it's precisely why small practices are targeted.
Two: you hold data worth stealing. Card payments, client contact and financial details, staff payroll information. A breach of that data carries state notification duties, payment-card consequences, and a hit to the local reputation a community practice depends on.
Three: your cyber insurer has become the de facto regulator. The renewal questionnaire asks whether you have MFA, backups, endpoint protection, and training. Answer inaccurately and a future claim can be reduced or denied. The requirement arrived without a law — but it arrived.
None of this needs a statute to be real. It needs a plan.
The Practice Cyber Checklist
Eight Controls Every Practice Should Have
No regulator publishes this list — so we did. Every item is delivered as part of our service, not as a “phase two”.
MFA on Your PIMS & Email
Multi-factor authentication on Cornerstone, AVImark, ezyVet, your email, and every cloud login — the single highest-value control.
Endpoint Detection & Response
Modern EDR on every reception, exam-room, and back-office device — not the consumer antivirus most practices still run.
Ransomware-Proof Backups
Offsite, immutable backups of your PIMS data, tested for recovery — so an attack is a bad day, not a closed practice.
Email Security
Filtering that catches the fake distributor invoices and phishing that target practice inboxes before staff ever see them.
Access Controls
Role-based access so front-desk, technicians, and doctors only reach what they need — and departing staff lose access immediately.
Secure Payment Handling
Card processing aligned with PCI DSS expectations, so client payment data isn't a liability sitting on a shared PC.
Staff Security Training
Onboarding plus short quarterly refreshers and phishing simulations — built for a busy practice, not a corporate LMS.
Incident Response Plan
A documented, tested playbook with named roles, so a breach doesn't mean improvising while the waiting room fills up.
Not sure which of these your practice has today?
Get a Free Practice Cyber CheckWhat Actually Hits Practices
Five Threats Worth a Practice Owner's Attention
Not a vendor scare deck — the attacks playing out across small practices now.
Ransomware Locking Your PIMS
The practice can't operateYour practice management system holds appointments, patient records, controlled-substance logs, and billing. When ransomware encrypts it, you can't check patients in, can't pull histories, can't process payments. Attackers know a practice can't tolerate downtime — which is exactly why they target it and price the ransom accordingly.
Fake Distributor Invoice Fraud
Money wired to a criminalAttackers impersonate familiar distributors and labs — the names your practice pays every month — and send a convincing invoice with new bank details. One redirected payment to a 'changed' account can cost a practice five figures before anyone notices.
Client & Payment Data Exposure
Reputation and liabilityEvery practice processes card payments and stores client contact, address, and financial details. A breach of that data triggers state notification duties, card-brand consequences, and the kind of local reputation damage a community practice can't easily absorb.
Insider Risk & Staff Turnover
The quiet, common breachVeterinary practices run high staff turnover and shared workstations, often with one password taped under the keyboard. Without proper access controls and offboarding, a former employee — or a walk-up to an unlocked front desk — has the run of your systems.
Phishing & Account Takeover
The way attackers get inMost incidents start with a single click. A staff member enters their email password into a convincing fake login page, and the attacker now reads your mail, watches your billing, and sets up the invoice fraud above. Training plus MFA closes most of this.
Sound Familiar?
What Practice Owners Tell Us
If any of these sound like your practice, you're in good company — and none of them are hard to fix.
PIMS dependence
“Our whole practice runs on Cornerstone. If it went down for a week I genuinely don't know what we'd do.”
Invoice fraud
“Accounts paid an invoice to a distributor last month and the bank details turned out to be fake.”
Shared-login risk
“The front desk PC has one login the whole team shares. The password hasn't changed in years.”
The IT-vs-security gap
“Our IT person keeps the network running but I couldn't tell you if we'd survive a ransomware attack.”
Insurance pressure
“Our cyber insurance renewal came with a questionnaire and I had no idea how to answer it honestly.”
A close call nearby
“A practice one town over got hit and couldn't see patients for days. It really shook me.”
We Speak Practice
Security that fits how a practice actually runs.
A busy practice can't have security that fights the workflow. We tune our controls around the realities of veterinary medicine — shared exam-room devices, a front desk that turns over, technicians moving between rooms, and a PIMS that everything depends on. Protection that the team can't work around isn't protection.
We know the difference between your PIMS vendor keeping their platform up and your practice being secure — and we own the gap between them: your devices, your email, your backups, your payments, and your people.
Talk to someone who gets itPIMS Platforms We Work With
And the Rest of the Stack
Microsoft 365 & Google Workspace · reference-lab integrations (IDEXX, Antech) · digital imaging / PACS · payment terminals · online booking and client-communication tools · backup and recovery for the whole environment.
No HIPAA — But Not Nothing
What Still Applies to a Veterinary Practice
There's no single veterinary cybersecurity law — but five separate obligations land on your practice anyway.
PCI DSS
Every practice processes card payments — PCI DSS expectations apply to how that data is handled and stored.
DEA Recordkeeping
Controlled-substance logs carry data-integrity and recordkeeping obligations that a ransomware event puts directly at risk.
State Breach-Notification Law
Client personal and financial data is covered by state data-breach notification statutes — a breach can trigger a duty to notify.
State Veterinary Board Rules
State boards enforce client confidentiality; some states have explicit veterinary-client privilege laws.
Cyber Insurer Requirements
The renewal questionnaire — MFA, backups, EDR, training — has become the de facto security standard for the profession.
General information, not legal advice. Obligations vary by state and by how your practice operates — consult your own counsel for what applies to you.
Right-Sized For Your Practice
Three Plans That Fit How Practices Buy
Month-to-month. No setup fees. No multi-year contracts.
Single-Location Practice
Essential
$375/mo
- Endpoint protection (EDR)
- Email security + MFA enforcement
- PIMS & cloud backup
- Quarterly staff security training
Multi-Doctor Practice
Business Plus
$799/mo
- Everything in Essential
- 24/7 monitoring & incident response
- Quarterly phishing simulations
- Access-control & offboarding reviews
- Cyber-insurance questionnaire support
- Incident response playbook
Specialty / Emergency / Group
Complete
$1,399/mo
- Everything in Business Plus
- Virtual CISO support (quarterly review)
- Multi-location & network segmentation
- Vendor & integration risk reviews
- Phishing-resistant MFA (security keys)
Practice groups and multi-site hospitals — contact us for custom pricing.
Quick Answers
What Practice Owners Actually Ask
Plain-English answers to the questions — and the searches — that bring practice owners to our door.
Do veterinary practices have to comply with HIPAA?
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No. HIPAA covers human healthcare; there is no direct veterinary equivalent. But that does not mean a practice has no obligations or no risk. Practices still handle payment-card data (PCI DSS expectations apply), controlled-substance records with DEA logging requirements, and client personal information protected by state data-breach notification laws and state veterinary board confidentiality rules. And your cyber insurer increasingly sets its own requirements regardless of regulation.
What is a PIMS and why is it a security priority?
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A PIMS — Practice Information Management System (also called practice management software) — is the core system a veterinary practice runs on: scheduling, patient records, treatment history, controlled-substance logs, invoicing, and lab integrations. Common platforms include Cornerstone, AVImark, ezyVet, and ImproMed. Because the practice cannot function without it, the PIMS is the highest-value target for ransomware and the first thing to protect with MFA, EDR, and tested backups.
What happens to a veterinary practice hit by ransomware?
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If the PIMS and connected systems are encrypted, the practice typically can't check in patients, pull medical histories, access controlled-substance records, or process payments. Recovery without good backups can take days to weeks. The combination of lost revenue, recovery cost, and any ransom is what makes ransomware an existential threat to a small practice — and why attackers target practices specifically.
Doesn't our PIMS vendor handle security?
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Your PIMS vendor secures and maintains their platform — its uptime and its hosting. They do not secure your staff devices, your email, your network, your payment workflow, your access controls, or your backups of the wider environment. Those are the practice's responsibility, and they are where the majority of incidents actually begin.
How much does cybersecurity for a veterinary practice cost?
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For a single-location general practice, expect roughly $375–$600 per month for managed security covering endpoint protection, email security, MFA, backup, and training. Multi-doctor practices, specialty or emergency hospitals, and small groups typically land in the $800–$1,400 per month range. That is a small fraction of the cost of a single ransomware incident or a serious data breach.
Our IT person already looks after the practice — isn't that enough?
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Most veterinary IT support is excellent at keeping the network and PIMS running, but break-fix IT and managed security are different disciplines. Security means 24/7 monitoring, behavioural threat detection, tested incident response, phishing training, and ongoing review. Ask whether your current support can demonstrate each control on the practice cyber checklist — not just whether the computers turn on.
Are small veterinary practices really targeted by cybercriminals?
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Yes — and often more than large organisations. Attackers favour small practices precisely because they usually have weaker defences and cannot tolerate downtime, which raises the odds of a ransom being paid. Most attacks are not personal or targeted by name; they are automated, opportunistic, and find practices through phishing and exposed systems.
What does cyber insurance require from a veterinary practice?
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Cyber insurers increasingly send a controls questionnaire at renewal asking about MFA, backups, endpoint protection, email security, and staff training. If you attest to controls you don't actually have and later file a claim, the claim can be reduced or denied. Practically, the insurer questionnaire has become the de facto security standard for veterinary medicine — and meeting it honestly is the goal.
Honest Answers
The Pushback We Hear — and Our Answer
There's no law forcing us to do this.
True — there's no veterinary HIPAA. But PCI DSS applies to your card processing, state breach-notification laws apply to your client data, your state board has confidentiality rules, and your cyber insurer sets requirements of its own. More to the point, ransomware doesn't check whether you're regulated before it encrypts your PIMS.
Our PIMS provider handles security.
They handle their platform's uptime. Your staff devices, email, network, payment handling, access controls, and backups are yours — and that's where most incidents start. A PIMS vendor even had a software security incident in 2022; vendor trust is not a substitute for your own controls.
We're too small to be a target.
Small practices are targeted more often, not less. Attacks are automated and opportunistic — attackers scan for weak, exposed systems and phish inboxes at scale. A small practice that can't operate without its PIMS is, from an attacker's point of view, an ideal target.
Our cyber insurance will cover it.
Only if you genuinely have the controls you attested to on the renewal questionnaire. Insurers are increasingly reducing or denying claims where the practice couldn't demonstrate MFA, backups, or training. Insurance is a financial backstop, not a defence — and it's getting conditional.
Our team is too busy for security training.
That's exactly why our training is built for practices — short quarterly refreshers and realistic phishing simulations, measured over time, not a day-long corporate course. The alternative, an untrained team, is the single most common way attackers get in.
We'll deal with it if something happens.
By then the PIMS is encrypted, the waiting room is full, and you're improvising. The controls on the checklist are inexpensive and fast to deploy; recovering from an incident without them is neither. Preparation is the cheaper path by a wide margin.
Dig Deeper
Practice-specific reading.
Cybersecurity for veterinary practices — the full plain-English guide
Why “no HIPAA” doesn't mean no risk, what data you actually hold, and the eight controls every practice needs.
Ransomware and your PIMS — when a practice can't reach its records
What actually happens when Cornerstone or AVImark is locked — and the seven controls that change the outcome.
Cyber insurance — how to pass the renewal questionnaire
With no HIPAA equivalent, your cyber insurer is the de facto regulator. What the questionnaire asks and why claims get denied.
Fake invoice fraud — how scammers target practice payments
A convincing email and a changed bank detail quietly redirect a real payment. The red flags and the controls that stop it.
Backup strategies that survive ransomware — the 3-2-1 rule explained
Your PIMS backup is your last line of defence — but only if ransomware can't reach it. What immutable and offline really mean.
Veterinary practice cyber-readiness checklist — PIMS & insurer-ready
An 8-control PIMS-ransomware-resistant baseline, the verification procedure that stops fake-distributor-invoice fraud, and a pre-filled cyber-insurance questionnaire prep sheet — all in one fillable document.
See where your practice stands — free.
A 30-minute Practice Cyber Check maps your practice against the eight-control checklist and shows you exactly where the gaps are. No jargon, no obligation.