Challenge
Invisible threats in plain sight
Dental office staff is focused on patients, not browsers. However, because staff spend much of their day working in browser-based applications, unmanaged browser extensions created a blind spot in an environment that handled sensitive patient data every day. When a receptionist opens Chrome to pull up a scheduling platform or check insurance eligibility, they are not scrutinizing their extension bar. A hijacked search engine, a quietly installed add-on, or an extension that redirects traffic and harvests data can persist undetected for weeks or months in a busy front desk environment.
“Before, we were operating on a break-fix model,” said Lars Andersland of Erickson’s Managed Services team. “If something was broken, we fixed it. Along the way, we might catch a browser hijacker on Chrome and remove it, but there was no proactive way that we could address threats like this.”
That reactive posture carried real risk for a client base governed by HIPAA. A malicious browser extension is not just an annoyance. It is a potential entry point into systems that store patient records, appointment data, and insurance information. With no formal extension inventory across 15,000 endpoints, there was no way to know what was lurking or any efficient way to find out. More importantly, there was no practical way to determine whether browser-based risks were increasing or decreasing across the environment. Visibility simply did not exist at scale.
“Dental offices don’t always notice when they’ve picked up a browser hijacker or a malicious extension,” Andersland explained. “As far as they’re concerned, there’s a browser and a search bar. They just search.”
Solution: Why Erickson Technologies Scales with NinjaOne
A platform already built for scale
The groundwork was already in place. Erickson Technologies moved from ConnectWise to NinjaOne years earlier, drawn by a cleaner interface and a platform that unified what had previously been scattered across multiple ConnectWise products. The migration was smooth, with nearly everything scripted over, and the team quickly settled into a workflow where endpoint health, remote access, and automation all lived in a single pane of glass. That simplicity is what made scale possible. ConnectWise’s fragmented toolset added friction as Erickson’s client base grew; NinjaOne’s clean, unified interface gave technicians the clarity to act quickly across hundreds of offices without switching tools or losing context.
Unlike standalone browser tools, Browser Management was delivered directly through the NinjaOne platform already used by Erickson technicians every day. No additional console, infrastructure, or technician training was required.
“Centralizing everything under a single platform with NinjaOne has been a significant operational advantage for our team,” said Andersland. “NinjaOne is built for scale. If we were to grow fivefold overnight, NinjaOne would handle it without a problem.”
Extension inventory across every browser
When NinjaOne Browser Management became available, Erickson joined as an early adopter, gaining access to the extension inventory feature. For the first time, technicians had a centralized inventory of browser extensions across all managed endpoints, allowing them to quickly identify unauthorized, suspicious, or removed extensions without manually investigating individual devices.
“If an extension can’t be found in the Chrome Web Store, nine times out of ten, that’s a malicious extension,” Andersland noted. “Now we can get on top of these things proactively, rather than waiting for an office to report a problem that may never get reported.”
If an extension had been pulled from the store, it was almost certainly flagged for malicious behavior. With a centralized list surfaced in NinjaOne, identifying those red flags became a matter of a few clicks rather than manually remoting into individual machines.
Results & Outcomes
100+ threats caught
The results were immediate. Since enabling extension inventory through NinjaOne Browser Management, Erickson Technologies has identified close to 100 malicious or suspicious browser extensions, and likely more, across their client base. Browser Management eliminated the need for technicians to discover these issues through support tickets, manual audits, or customer complaints. Risks were identified proactively and at scale. Every threat was caught, without an office ever calling in a complaint.
“We’ve identified close to 100 malicious or suspicious extensions, cases that otherwise wouldn’t have come to light,” said Andersland. “It’s good to catch things that dental offices would never think to flag themselves.”
For an MSP supporting HIPAA-regulated healthcare providers across hundreds of dental practices, those removals are not just operational wins. Each one represents a potential breach that did not happen and a client whose patient data stayed protected.
“NinjaOne Browser Management gave us visibility we never had before,” said Andersland. “We manage thousands of endpoints in HIPAA-regulated environments. Being able to find and remove browser threats before a client even notices is exactly the kind of protection they count on us for.”
Speed and reliability at scale
NinjaOne gives Erickson total control and flexibility over how they automate repetitive or complex tasks, winning back time and standardizing operations across their client base, up to 40x faster than legacy solutions. And for a team managing dental networks, devices, servers, and workstations across hundreds of practices, reliability matters just as much as speed. NinjaOne’s single pane of glass keeps Erickson running with 50% greater reliability than before, so the team can stay focused on their clients rather than their tools.
“We wanted a tool that supported a lot more automation, scripting and things of that nature,” Andersland said. “We have over 60 scripts that run on an hourly basis across our client base, with over a hundred more scripts that range from automating client onboarding to implementing patches for dental practice management software.”
Expanding browser control and security
While extension visibility has already delivered significant value, Erickson sees Browser Management evolving into a broader browser governance platform. Upcoming capabilities such as risk scoring, URL policy enforcement, categorical web filtering, and expanded macOS support will help the team move beyond visibility and into more proactive control of browser-based risk.
“Risk scoring would make evaluating extensions a lot less black and white,” Andersland said. “Right now, if an extension is still live on the Chrome Web Store, it takes more digging to determine whether it’s actually safe. With risk scoring, we could pinpoint suspicious behavior right away.”
Erickson is also looking forward to browser-based URL controls that allow more precise policy enforcement than traditional network filtering. For many dental practices, browser usage policies vary by role and workflow, making broad firewall restrictions difficult to implement effectively.
“Categorical blocking through the browser would be far more granular than anything we could do at the firewall level,” Andersland said. “That fills a real need our clients have been asking about for years.”
Asked on a scale of one to ten how likely he is to make Browser Management a permanent part of Erickson’s standard offering, Andersland did not hesitate. “Definitely 10,” he said. “I’m very excited to see where things go from here.”