November 11, 2026
Thanksgiving Cybersecurity: 5 Ways to Protect Your Dental Practice During the Holiday Break
Before your team leaves for Thanksgiving, take five practical steps to protect patient information, payment processes, mobile devices, and your practice network.
Thanksgiving brings well-earned time away from the office, but reduced staffing and changed routines can also create openings for fraud, lost devices, and delayed incident response. Before your team heads home, use this five-part checklist to help keep your dental practice and patient information protected.
1. Keep Your Holiday Schedule Off the Menu
Avoid publishing detailed office-closure plans, employee travel information, or the name of the one person who will be checking messages. Keep automatic replies brief, and give patients a general contact path rather than personal schedules. Internally, confirm who may access systems during the closure and remove temporary access when it is no longer needed.
Quick action: Review public posts, voicemail greetings, and automatic replies for unnecessary details about when the office will be empty.
2. Give Guests Their Own Wi-Fi Table
If family, vendors, or temporary workers visit the office, keep their phones and laptops off the network used by practice-management systems, imaging equipment, payment devices, and clinical workstations. Use a separate guest network with its own password, and confirm that the router and access points are running current firmware.
Quick action: Test the guest network before the holiday and make sure it cannot reach internal practice devices.
3. Call Before Changing Payment Details
Holiday schedules create a perfect excuse for urgent-looking requests involving invoices, payroll, gift cards, or updated bank information. The FBI recommends verifying account-information changes through a second channel. Call the vendor or requestor using a trusted number already on file—not the phone number supplied in the email.
Quick action: Require verbal confirmation and a second approver for payment or banking changes received around the holiday.
4. Keep Patient Information Protected on the Road
Any phone, tablet, or laptop used to access practice email or patient information should have a strong screen lock, encryption, current security updates, and remote-wipe capability. Avoid untrusted public networks; use your approved secure connection when remote access is necessary. Lost or stolen devices should be reported immediately.
Quick action: Before anyone travels, verify screen-lock, encryption, update, and remote-wipe settings on every approved mobile device.
5. Know Who Answers the Security Alarm
An alert is only useful if someone sees it and knows what to do. Create a short holiday contact list for suspicious logins, lost devices, payment fraud, ransomware warnings, and system outages. Include your IT contact, practice owner, key software vendors, bank fraud number, and cyber-insurance reporting number where applicable.
Quick action: Run a five-minute tabletop check: “If this alert arrives Thanksgiving morning, who receives it, who makes the call, and what is the first action?”
A Safer Holiday Starts Before the Office Closes
SuperHero IT Solutions can help your dental practice review remote access, guest networking, mobile-device security, monitoring, backups, and incident-response contacts before the holiday break. Contact us to schedule a Thanksgiving cybersecurity readiness review.
This newsletter provides general cybersecurity education and is not legal or compliance advice. Security measures should be selected based on your organization’s risks and applicable requirements.
