Month: July 2017

From “Fears of Hackers Targeting U.S. Hospitals, Medical Devices for Cyber Attacks”
ABC News (06/29/17) Harris, Dan; Kapetaneas, John; Zepeda, Robert; et al. Posted by ASIS.

Hospital computers and medical devices are potentially vulnerable to hacking, according to cybersecurity experts. Among the U.S. computers affected in the Petya ransomware attack that quickly spread to countries around the world Tuesday were hospital computers. Last month, the WannaCry ransomware shut down 65 hospitals in the United Kingdom, affecting not just computers but storage refrigerators and MRI machines, and last January, Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles paid out $17,000 after hackers took control of its computers. To combat this problem, doctors, security experts and government employees recently converged at the University of Arizona Medical School in Phoenix to witness the first-ever simulated hack of a hospital. “Anything that is plugged in,” whether it has a Wi-Fi connection or not, can be vulnerable to hacking, and lots of medical devices, such as pacemakers and ventilators, are connected to the Internet for the benefit of the patients, says Dr. Jeff Tully, a pediatrician and self-proclaimed hacker who organized the event and staged the cyberattack with Dr. Christian Dameff, an emergency medicine physician. Cybersecurity expert Josh Corman, who recently served on a congressional task force for the U.S. Health and Human Services Department to investigate health care systems, said these systems are easy to hack because often the computers are running “on very old, unsupported systems.” Also, hospitals need to invest more in qualified cybersecurity personnel. Corman’s team conducted a yearlong investigation and found that at least 85 percent of hospitals do not have a single qualified [cyber]security person on staff.