Healthcare Challenges in the Era of Cybersecurity

Abstract

As a result of the extensive integration of technology into the healthcare system, cybersecurity incidents have become an increasing challenge for the healthcare industry. Recent examples include WannaCry, a nontargeted ransomware attack on more than 150 countries worldwide that temporarily crippled parts of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, and the 2016 ransomware attack on Los Angeles's Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. The attacks cost millions of dollars in lost revenue and fines, as well as significant reputational damage. Efforts are needed to devise tools that allow experts to more accurately quantify the actual impact of such events on both individual patients and healthcare systems as a whole. While the United States has robust disaster preparedness and response systems integrated throughout the healthcare and government sectors, the rapidly evolving cybersecurity threat against healthcare entities is outpacing existing countermeasures and challenges in the ''all-hazards'' disaster preparedness paradigm. Further epidemiologic research of clinical cybersecurity attacks and their effects on patient care and clinical outcomes is necessary to prevent and mitigate future attacks.

Health Care Cybersecurity Challenges and Solutions Under the Climate of COVID-19: Scoping Review

“…Gordon et al [31] There is low awareness in the health sector of cyber risks Furnell and Shah [32] The most common action taken in response to breaches or attacks is additional staff training or communication Coventry et al [33] Health staff has poor awareness of consequences of behavior, and there is a lack of policies and reinforcement of secure behavior Kaplan [34] There is a lack of pandemic-specific cybersecurity training campaigns, documented procedures, and guidance on revised procedures and technologies Inadequate board-level risk assessment communication Barad [35] There is a need for a matrix that can translate the strategic requirements of a health care system into prioritized cyber improvement needs Tully et al [36] There is a lack of understanding of security risks and its impact on organization-wide risk management Jones and Katzis [37] There is a lack of appreciation among health care executive management of the business risk impact associated with cyber breaches…”

“…There is a lack of understanding of security risks and its impact on organization-wide risk management, such as impacts on patient care and clinical outcomes [36]. The health sector lacks a matrix that can translate the strategic improvement needs of a health care system into prioritized information/cyber improvement needs [35].…”

An Ensemble-Based Scalable Approach for Intrusion Detection Using Big Data Framework

“…False positive rate It is defined as the probability of falsely rejecting the null hypothesis. The formula to find the FPR is given in Equation (6).…”

“…Researchers used big data to solve multidisciplinary problems more effectively. [5][6][7] In this work, big data is used to address the intrusion classification problem. The distributed processing avoids bottleneck situations during execution as per the literature.…”

Towards the Representation of Network Assets in Health Care Environments Using Ontologies

“…Within Computer Science a “system” is characterized as: “ the collection of multiple entities such as devices (mobile phones, sensors) software (operating systems, development platforms, programs, apps), companies (device manufacturers, carrier, app stores), processes (networking, Short Message Service - SMS, database transactions), and end users/stakeholders (patients, IT managers, health care managers) . ” 1 Cybersecurity refers to “the protection of computer-based technology from deliberate or inadvertent disruption via manipulation of underlying software, hardware, or networked connections.” 2 There are currently software tools able to collect detailed data about the information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure, and relate this information with cybersecurity data (vulnerabilities, severity, remediation measures, etc.) made available by international cybersecurity authorities.…”