healthcare cybersecurity

“‘Murder by pacemaker’” isn’t a real thing, is it?” my friend asked. She’d been binging on Netflix and caught a TV drama in which the victim’s pacemaker was hacked. From a remote location, the hacker—a murderer for hire—was able to access the device, accelerate the victim’s heart rate, and cause car…

Keith Rabbin is a Senior Security Consultant at Cisco who is passionate about helping organizations minimize the risk they face with the evolving threat landscape. This passion has led him to develop a security-focused assessment based on the Cisco SAFE Framework that helps organizations identify ga…

It’s an old trope in horror movies: “The call is coming from inside the house!” For healthcare professionals, there’s a similar tale that’s almost as scary — and unfortunately, real. A recent analysis found that healthcare is the only industry in which insider threats (…

It used to be science fiction.  Now, it’s real. Hackers can use an unprotected infusion pump on the network as a gateway to your hospital’s data. A staff member might unknowingly download a malicious PDF from an email. Or perhaps a virus has been lurking undetected in your network for some time. The…

Today, I’m Cisco’s national director for healthcare in Canada — but in a former life I was a Registered Nurse. As we approach the biggest Health IT event of the year, I have a few thoughts on the upcoming conference from a clinician’s perspective. Watch this short video to find out: The…

If 2017 was about ransomware attacks, 2018 will be about cyber attacks on the Internet of Things (aka medical devices). As we begin the year, that’s the message we’re hearing from a number of sources. This should come as no surprise to those of us in the healthcare industry, given the re…

“If Microsoft calls and asks you for your password…it’s not real, ” said Steve LeBlond, VP of Technology and CTO of Ochsner Health System, while speaking at our Digital Health Summit on October 3. “We [Information Technology] will never ask you to log us in.” Stev…

­­The FDA recall of a medical device last week has caused a bit of a media storm as the general public scrambles to find out more. The fact that a medical device meant to help sustain life is insecure and could be hacked to kill a patient is alarming to all of us. More worrying is that the medical d…

This week, the FDA took the unprecedented step of recalling a medical device – a pacemaker – because it was found to be vulnerable to cyber threats. The recall arose from an investigation by the FDA in February that highlighted a number of areas of non-compliance. While there are no known reports of…