The Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center issued an alert on September 8, 2022 warning about security risks associated with AI, 5G networks, nanomedicine, smart hospitals, and quantum computing.
In addition, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a notice outlining the security and patient safety risks associated with unpatched and legacy medical devices. The FBI has observed a recent uptick in medical device vulnerabilities. If exploited, threat actors can leverage outdated software and poor security features within medical devices to execute cyberattacks.
View the Cybersecurity PowerPoint HERE.
5G in Healthcare: Security Concerns
In many ways, security threats for 5G-enabled healthcare technologies overlap with IoT threats:
- Need to secure medical devices as they connect to the network (authentication)
- Need to secure data as it is transmitted to/from medical devices (end-to-end encryption)
- Need to secure data on the device (whole disk encryption or similar procedure)
- IoMT software/firmware development should include both trustworthiness and resilience
- Trustworthiness may require the use of authentication and encryption technology
- Resilience may require a fallback to a safe mode in the case of a cyberattack
- Software design and update practices should be transparent
- The design and implementation of the software in medical devices should include a specification of cybersecurity features and validation of those features, as well as a Cybersecurity Bill of Materials
- Regularly employ static and/or dynamic vulnerability testing of the software on 5G devices
- Regularly update the software on 5G devices in a secure manner
- It will be absolutely critical to segment and monitor 5G networks
