Cybersecurity in Healthcare

For the past few years, we have observed a wave of cyberattacks touching healthcare environments, particularly hospitals. Many hospitals have been disabled due to cyber-attacks, for weeks and sometimes months. This is bringing to light the increased reliance of healthcare environments on digital infrastructures, and consequently, their attack surface has significantly increased. Healthcare environments have specificity that makes them particularly difficult in terms of cybersecurity. First, they are highly distributed, making them very open, with remote offices that are deployed to increase care efficiency (up to home care). Second, it is very hard to introduce segmentation and access control, as efficient communication is of the utmost importance and these classic cybersecurity techniques induce overhead. Third, users of the medical infrastructure (doctors, nurses, patients) are considering digital infrastructures for their practical use and are not digital specialists; they thus are likely to fall prey to malicious actors. Fourth, medical devices and platforms are subject to many regulations, which make compliance complicated.