Medical IoT Concerns

Doctors should help design medical IoT to ensure that they are secure and safe, a white-hat hacker and expert in medical security IoT has warned.

18:55 24 November 2017

Dr. Christian Dameff, a faculty member at UC San Diego’s medical school, a white-hat hacker and expert in medical IoT security, has said that the state of medical security is alarming at best. Addressing the audience at the Security of Things USA convention in San Diego, he said: “Software powers modern healthcare. It is as essential as antibiotics, x-rays and surgery combined. Without our technical systems, doctors today are essentially helpless for taking care of strokes, heart attacks and traumas.”

 

However, he said that although connected devices automate and speed up many tasks to provide medical care to patients, they could be hacked by outside agents. “What surrounds the patient are dozens of wirelessly connected devices that are running legacy operating systems, that are unpatched, that have hard-coded credentials you can Google – that are controlling potent medications being infused into this patient that, if miscalculated or altered, can cause this patient to die. That is the state of modern healthcare IoT. We need to change it.”

                                                                                 

He then urged device makers to involve doctors in the creation of medical IoT gear. “Have them help you identify points of your product that, if it should fail, would result in patient harm, not just a compromise of their medical health information,” he said.