Healthcare Cyber Threats That Should Keep You Up At Night

By Kelvin Murray, Webroot

In my previous blog post, Why Healthcare Organizations are Easy Targets for Cybercrime, I discussed various reasons that hospitals and healthcare organizations make desirable and lucrative targets for hackers. In this second installment, I’ll go over how criminals are attacking these organizations, the methods they use, and also what needs to be done to begin to address this dangerous threat. 

Medical Device Compromise

As I mentioned in my first blog on this topic, there is a wide array of connected medical devices in a hospital environment. These devices can be classified into 5 broad categories:

• Consumer wearables, such as sleep pattern monitors, fitness trackers, etc.
• Patient monitoring devices, including insulin pumps, ECG, heart rate monitors etc.
• IVD, blood analyzers, etc.
• Embedded devices, such as pacemakers and implants
• In-house equipment, like medicine dispensing systems, MRI, CT, and X-ray machines, etc.