4 med-tech security issues Covid exacerbates

Seth Rosenblatt -

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Like many other industries over the past year, cybersecurity and digital privacy were not immune to Covid-19.

At the RSA Conference last week, three security experts talked about their biggest pandemic-related concerns for health care cybersecurity, as vaccinations spread and the pandemic subsides:

  • a scourge of ransomware
  • a ramp-up in collection of human DNA data
  • an onslaught of medical disinformation, and
  • a plethora of connected yet unsecured medical devices

The experts spoke by phone with The Parallax after the conference.

Stopping the scourge of ransomware

Stopping ransomware will take a comprehensive approach to improving cybersecurity hygiene at hospitals and other health care organizations, says Caleb Barlow, the CEO and president of cybersecurity company CynergisTek. But it’s also time for health care organizations to stop ransomware payments.

“Even in health care, we have to stop paying ransoms,” Barlow says. “We need to change the economics. That’s the only way this gets fixed. We call a foreign actor, not necessarily a nation-state, a cybercriminal because [it’s] taken down an entire hospital system or oil pipeline. But if that was happening in a different way, we’d be talking about a kinetic response.”

While Parallax readers are likely familiar with the ongoing impact of ransomware on health care, from patient harm to pharmaceutical espionage, Barlow is also concerned about keeping the human genome safe from malicious hackers.