Cyber Security

As many of you are aware, cyber attacks have been, and will continue to be, waged against the pregnancy help community. 

One method Heartbeat has observed is flooding center schedulers with fake appointment requests so that legitimate requests can't be entered. Another is flooding review sites (such as Yelp or Google) with negative reviews. 

While we've talked before about inviting positive reviews from your actual clients and reporting reviews that are clearly by people who have never visited your organization, the experts at Next Level want to make sure you know about the best way to challenge tactics that target schedulers.

Next Level has implemented a Captcha function for their self-service Center Scheduler feature to mitigate this threat.The goal of Captcha is to ensure all appointment requesters come from humans, not bots or scripts spamming a system. In other words, visitors to a center's website that uses Next Level must answer a Captcha challenge correctly in order to request an appointment (like many websites require to comment, create an account, or schedule an appointment). (See the image below for an example.)

If you've found this tactic preventing your clients from being able to schedule appointments, or just want to be proactive about preventing it, reach out to your online scheduling provider and ask about adding Captcha. If you find yourself wanting a CMS made specifically for pregnancy help organizations, check out NextLevelCMS.com to find out what Heartbeat has to offer!