BOSTON –     Every seven seconds, someone tries to hack into the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

It's not an unusual threat, nor is the Boston-based hospital alone in dealing with cyber attacks. Hospitals and healthcare providers are under constant pressure to maintain the security of their online information, with varying degrees of success.

"The faster we innovate, the faster the attackers innovate," says John Halamka, chief information officer of the Massachusetts-based CareGroup Health System and an expert on healthcare IT. In fact, he said, when his hospital launched its new Web site and URL last year, it was attacked within 30 seconds, and more than 600 attacks were recorded on the first day alone.

To deal with these threats, Beth Israel Deaconess and its three partner hospitals  -  Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Needham, Mass., New England Baptist Hospital in Boston and Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge  -  turned to Third Brigade to set up a security network at the server level.

"We're blocking it at a much higher level" than at the application level, he said. "Things have gotten so sophisticated that we need this level of protection."

Steven Porter, director of IT at Arizona-based Touchstone Behavioral Health, agrees. Porter is using Symantec's End-Point Protection software to ensure the security of laptops sent out into the field  -  be it a client's house, a school, a park or a fast-food restaurant.

The key to any security software, he said, is separating the legitimate users and uses from those looking to steal data or wreak havoc.

"Because we're dealing with children, and with the dark side of human behavior, there are times when our therapists are dealing with Web sites that we would normally block," he said. Symantec "is a lot less intrusive, but allows us to be aggressive in monitoring and dealing with malware."