Cybersecurity challenges can represent an existential threat to patients on medical devices, and a new report by New York-based Cynerio Inc. highlights some of those challenges. One of the findings in the report is that nearly three-fourths of intravenous pumps, which make up 38% of a hospital’s internet of things (IoT) footprint, are vulnerable to an attack, a predicament that continues to put desperately ill patients in jeopardy.
Responding to the growing number of state-sponsored cyber threats to health care and other key sectors and to the compromise of the Microsoft Exchange Server, which was disclosed in March, Canada, the EU, U.K., U.S. and other NATO allies issued statements July 19 laying out expectations and markers for how responsible nations behave in cyberspace and specifically calling out China’s “malicious cyber activity.”
As cyberattacks on U.S. hospitals continue to increase with health care’s growing reliance on technology, a new report from the U.S. Office of Inspector General (OIG) has flagged Medicare’s requirements for being silent on the cybersecurity of networked medical devices. The OIG’s study found hospitals are not required to identify networked device cybersecurity in their emergency preparedness risk assessments, and as a result, they don’t include this information “very often.”
A new report on the biopharma industry by cybersecurity firm Bluevoyant LLC found that the eight most prominent players in the race for a COVID-19 vaccine faced the highest volume of targeted, malicious cyberattacks, and 77% of the total 20 companies examined had unsecured remote desktop protocol (RDP) ports and email domains lacking basic measures to block hackers. “COVID-19 vaccines are the crown jewels of 2020 – and cyber attackers know it,” the report says.
A new report on the biopharma industry by cybersecurity firm Bluevoyant LLC found that the eight most prominent players in the race for a COVID-19 vaccine faced the highest volume of targeted, malicious cyberattacks, and 77% of the total 20 companies examined had unsecured remote desktop protocol (RDP) ports and email domains lacking basic measures to block hackers. “COVID-19 vaccines are the crown jewels of 2020 – and cyber attackers know it,” the report says.
LONDON – Pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers working on COVID-19 vaccines are being targeted by Russian state-sponsored hackers, according to the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). The U.K. view is endorsed by the U.S. National Security Agency and Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, and the three agencies have issued a joint statement advising companies how to protect against these attacks.
Hospitals may be providing patient care outside of normal clinical settings during the COVID-19 outbreak, but this raises the question of how to access patient data systems in these makeshift settings. Arthur Young, president and CEO of Interbit Data Inc., of Natick, Mass., told BioWorld that the company’s solution is to add Internet-based access to its Netsafe system.
LONDON – France's Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament et des Produits de Santé (ANSM) has published draft guidelines on the cybersecurity of medical devices, becoming the first national regulator in Europe to specify what manufacturers should do to protect devices against malicious attacks.