Hospital devices in the skilled hands of caregivers are often crucial to creating the best possible patient outcomes, but are those devices secured for the modern world? One such device is the infusion pump, which is the only way to provide the delivery of fine-tuned amounts of medications in perfect rhythm. Patients in neonatal ICU are dependent on this precious machine to handle a job beyond the abilities of human hands, and many “smart” infusion pumps are now part of the the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), and therefore vulnerable to cyber attack.
Emergency and life-critical services are reliant on hosts of medical sensors and monitoring devices that are now all being built internet-ready, and in our current environment are rarely secure by design. Take, for example, the potential effect of cyber threat activity on an MRI or a CT scan. Malware would be able to “add or remove cancerous nodules, causing a patient to be misdiagnosed or wrongly treated.” The 1 backup generators that every hospital must have on standby more often than not represent an even easier target, as hackers are already familiar with disrupting or taking hostage work sites’ generators. Healthcare providers require a strong, easy-to-use baseline of cybersecurity solutions to safeguard human lives in their care.
