“Digital security related to medical devices such as
pacemakers and MRI machines has become a growing concern.
In 2012, the Government Accountability Office issued a
report stating that a number of intentional security threats could exploit
vulnerabilities in implantable medical devices and called on the Food and Drug
Administration to consider the risks in its approval process”.
The following news
item Tuesday is very scary!.
“A Southern California hospital fell victim to hackers last
week — offering a glimpse at one of many digital threats facing health care. Hollywood Presbyterian is at least the fourth hospital this year to be reportedly affected by
ransomware.
Criminals reportedly infected Hollywood Presbyterian
Medical Center computers with ransomware — malware that cryptographically locks
devices. The thieves have demanded 9,000 bitcoins, the equivalent of $3.65
million, to unlock the machines, according to sources who spoke with Los Angeles television stations.
Though there are no recorded patient injuries or deaths tied
to cyberattacks, digital security in hospitals, and, perhaps, more importantly
in medical devices such as pacemakers and MRI machines, has become a growing
concern in the industry.
When Avi Rubin began taking tours of East Coast hospitals in
the 1990s, he found myriad reasons to worry.
Sloppy password protections at computer labs, practices
vulnerable to tampering, and drug dispensing robots controlled by software.
“What if something went wrong with that software?” said
Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer science professor, at the Enigma
Conference, a security gathering in San Francisco last month.
“What if someone were attack this system and cause all the
drugs to be wrong?”
If those changes weren’t noticed, thousands of people could
receive incorrect dosages or medication. They could die.
This doesn't come as much of a surprise. When my late father was hospitalized last year I noticed that each nurse had a cart with a laptop computer which they used for entering everything from a patient's vitals to scanning the barcodes on the patient's wristband and the medications that were administered. When the laptops were low on juice the carts would be rolled to an electrical outlet in the hallway for a battery recharge and often the screensaver would come on. I was surprised the laptops were still using the Windows XP operating system, which Microsoft had stopped supporting several years earlier. The XP logo would bounce around a black screen giving a subtle reminder just how vulnerable the hospital's database of personal medical information was to potential security threats.
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