Security Tools and SaaS

With between 45 and 65 different security vendors' tools in the average hospital CISO's tool box, healthcare providers need to make sure that third-party tools work well together and do not create unwanted complexity or introduce their own vulnerabilities.

Smaller providers in particular should look to partner with service providers to procure and consume expert security services rather than continue to pour money into the management of in-house tools. Most simply can no longer afford to attract and retain the levels of cybersecurity staff needed to defend against sophisticated attacks or to maintain an adequate level of risk management and compliance.

Security-as-a-Service (SaaS) is helping to reset the imbalance between attacker and defender, and when healthcare security teams are outnumbered 5 to 1, they need all the help they can get!

This was the subject of my recent video interview with HIMSS.

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Shiny Objects

Security leaders all too often succumb to the distraction of a new shiny object that promises to be the panacea to all their security problems. Vendors encourage this line of thinking happy to make another sale and to have a new customer. What makes things worse is that a focus on CapEx budgets at most organizations to buy and implement more tools encourages this behavior when really an annual service may be a far cheaper, better, and faster solution to meet organizational needs.

Shiny Object Syndrome' in the security realm is often associated with a myopic focus on one critical area of weakness or vulnerability

'Shiny Object Syndrome' in the security realm is often associated with a myopic focus on one critical area of weakness or vulnerability. Perhaps an audit or assessment highlighted the gap and Executive Management jumped all over it. Perhaps a barrage of vendors telling you that you must have something in a particular space wore the CISO down, but be assured that security gaps are usually many, and are usually spread across a wide range of areas even for the most well-staffed and best-funded security departments.

Understanding Risk

Before rushing to implement solutions and being distracted by shiny objects, first make sure you have a comprehensive and holistic understanding of Digital and Integrated Risk as part of the organization's overall business enterprise risk strategy. Think about new areas of digital risk such as IoT that may not have been included in your last security audit or compliance assessment. Think about new business offerings and the strategic IT plan and how that may introduce weaknesses to the cyber defenses you have already put in place. And remind yourself that compliance is just one side of the CIA triangle that CISOs are responsible for.

Attacks against the Availability of IT systems is on the rise - just look back to the recent WannaCry and Not Petya attacks. The damage was far greater monetarily and reputationally  than a fine or slap on the wrist for a confidentiality breach. With the rise in BotNet scale and sophistication and their increasing use by cyber criminals and state actors to distract or execute attacks, protecting the availability of data and systems will become far more important, if in fact it isn't already. Just ask Maersk or the British National Health Service!

First identify ALL assets. That includes IoT devices that are network attached, could be network attached but aren't currently, or contain sensitive data. This includes hospital medical devices and building management systems - even if they are on their own VLANs. Unless they are on air-gapped networks or are securely segmented using firewalls or Cisco ISE/TrustSec then they can be easily attacked and usually have little to no defenses. Just ask Cisco Talos which has been conducting extensive testing and hacking of building management systems over the past year. How embarrassing would it be to have to report to the CEO that an attack against the enterprise SAN was executed from a hacked office thermostat?

Use new discovery tools to identify IoT assets. New services from the likes of CyberMDX, CloudPost, ZingBox and others will identify medical devices, device types, software versions and VLAN location via passive observation of biomedical network traffic without threatening a device. Active and passive scanning of business networks will identify traditional assets. IRM tools like IRM|PRO from Clearwater Compliance and others can consume scan data and combine with other information to perform full Risk Analysis, as well as HIPAA security and privacy compliance or NIST framework assessment.

Risks need to have 3 components: An Asset, a Threat and a Vulnerability



Threats come in 4 categories according to NIST: Accidental, Adversarial, Structural or Environmental

Risk = Likelihood * Impact

Many if not most IRM tools use a 25 point scale to evaluate risk, such that a risk appetite can be agreed with the board of typically 15 (or lower for more mature or risk adverse organizations) and any identified risk above that threshold needs to be dealt with. Risks are typically dealt with via remediation, eradication, transfer, or by compensating controls. Once identified, risks should be prioritized and entered into a risk register and remediation plans drawn up.

Overall Risk
Impact	Disastrous (5)	Low	Medium	High	High	Critical
	Major (4)	Low	Medium	Medium	High	High
	Moderate (3)	Low	Low	Medium	Medium	High
	Minor (2)	Low	Low	Low	Medium	Medium
	Insignificant (1)	Low	Low	Low	Low	Low
		Rare (1)	Unlikely (2)	Moderate (3)	Likely (4)	Almost Certain (5)
	Likelihood

Clearwater uses a 25 point scale from zero to 25 as do many other leaders in the IRM space.

New Tools

Before investing in a new tool, figure out how long its going to take to put that tool into production and what level of effort it will take to get there. Till that tool goes live its nothing more than expensive shelf-ware and could become a thorn in your side if implementation proves to be longer than the board or executive team's patience.

Many security tools can require upwards of 2 years to fully implement and take their place in the defensive line up. According to CIO Magazine the average CISO tenure is now 17 months. Ponemon places it at 2.1 years. Either way, your 2 year project is unlikely to get from PO to production implementation before you move on to the next opportunity or challenge, so what does that say for the prospects of eventual completion under a different security leader? More importantly, how will your efforts been seen in hindsight - as a success or failure, especially if you aren't there to see it through?

SaaS - Would a Security Service be Better?

The nice thing about security-as-a-service is that if it begins to no longer meet your changing requirements or you fall out of love with it, then you simply part company at the end of the contract and fire-up an agreement with a competitor. It allows you to have the best protection you can afford each year and not get stuck with something out of date.

Procuring and implementing tools gets you locked into a multi-year marriage often with a spouse you have never met before. Depending on your depreciation schedules you could be stuck for 5 or 10 years. Whats-more, you will not be defended by the new tool till you have figured out how to use it and how to get it to production.

SaaS makes particular sense for smaller companies that may be resource-constrained by the number and caliber of security staff they can attract and retain in an increasingly highly competitive job market. It also makes great sense where a significant risk has been identified and where no compensating security controls can be leveraged to reduce risk exposure for the period it takes to procure, build, test and implement a new tool. When you absolutely have to have something now, a service will generally be a much more immediate fix.

More About Shiny Objects

Shiny objects may be OK when we are talking about a SaaS based service, but their shininess is very much dependent upon a thorough understanding of a solid and comprehensive risk analysis before the business can justify service procurement.

Most organizations have a hard enough time conducting a proper risk analysis let alone avoiding the distractions of shiny objects. No wonder then that so many fail.

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Hacking Healthcare Live: Bits and Bytes Meet Flesh and Blood

Possibly one of the BEST EVER demos at RSA of all time for anyone in the medical space. Watch a live simulated medical device hack as an unsuspecting ER doctor faces the reality of practice in a brave new world of insecure technologies and vulnerable patients.

Doctors Christian Dameff MD and Jeff Tully MD from the University of California Health System are joined by Josh Corman from I Am The Cavalry to demonstrate what can happen when a medical device attached to a an ER patient is hacked.

Healthcare cybersecurity is in critical condition. This session takes you to the front-line of efforts to save lives threatened by ransomware and runaway pacemakers.

Learning Objectives:
1: Understand how recent attacks and device vulnerabilities threaten patient lives.
2: Explore the recommendations of the Healthcare Industry Cybersecurity Task Force.
3: Witness a doctor undergo a live clinical simulation of a hacked medical device.

Speakers
Dr. Christian Dameff, Emergency Physician and Clinical Informatics Fellow, University of California San Diego
Dr. Jeff Tully, Anesthesiologist and Pediatrician, University of California Davis
Josh Corman, CSO/Founder, PTC / I am The Cavalry

Hacking Healthcare Live: Bits and Bytes Meet Flesh and Blood from the 2018 RSA Conference.

This video demonstration starts at 0:30 and runs for approximately 45 minutes.

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2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report

Cisco today released it's 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report providing a freshly updated view into the current techniques that adversaries use to elude defenses and evade detection, along with insights and recommendations designed to help organizations and users defend against attacks.

The report is based upon a study conducted by Cisco of 3600 Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and security industry leaders from 26 countries.

This year’s report findings show a maturing, more sophisticated tradecraft by attackers. Case in point: adversaries are increasingly embracing encryption – meant to enhance security – to conceal command-and-control activity. The Cisco Talos threat research team reports that 50 percent of global web traffic was encrypted as of October 2017, a 12 percent volume increase from November 2016. Cisco also observed a more than threefold increase in encrypted network communication used by inspected malware samples during that time. As the volume of encrypted global web traffic grows, adversaries are broadening their use of encryption as a way to mask command-and-control activity, providing them more time to operate and inflict damage sight-unseen.

The evolution of ransomware was another of the most significant threat developments in 2017. By introducing network-based ransomware worms, attackers have eliminated the need for human interaction in launching ransomware campaigns. They also changed the game from pursuing ransom to the outright destruction of systems, data and operations. We all saw these rapid-moving, network-based attacks with WannaCry and Nyetya, and Cisco expects more automated crypto-worm activity in the year ahead.

The report report spotlights how adversaries are evolving their approaches to exploit new technology security gaps, particularly in IoT devices which are often exposed because they were deployed improperly or left open intentionally for convenience. This includes the growing number of medical devices in hospitals and other healthcare delivery sites, which are often not patched or maintained once purchased.

See the full report for additional perspectives and what defenders can do to to set the security bar higher.

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New Zealand Healthcare - Just Keeping its Head Above Water!

New Zealand Healthcare - Just keeping its head above water.  Photo: Hamish Clark.

Securing the delivery of healthcare services in New Zealand faces many of the same challenges as in other mixed public / private health systems. Chronic under-funding of the public health system by government austerity measures is putting pressure on a system already overloaded. Net immigration to New Zealand is combining with a rapidly aging population that is living longer, and contributing to increased patient numbers and demand for services. Hospital administrators have been forced to make tough decisions to prioritize what little resources are available to only the most critical of patients. The result is that many elective surgeries especially for the elderly are in decline and little funding remains to secure and defend hospitals from cyber attack.

As a result of the crisis in the public health system and waitlists approaching a year for patients requiring surgery, those who can afford it, are switching to private healthcare delivery and health insurance. The overall percentage of healthcare services delivered via the New Zealand public system has consequently dropped to roughly 75%. A growth in private care is picking up the rest.

Could New Zealand's Health System come crashing down?  Photo: Lindsey Costa.

New Zealand spends roughly a third of the per-capita expenditure on health compared with the United States. Despite this, healthcare in the country is comprehensive yet quite inefficient, and heavily reliant upon legacy models of care, including more expensive hospital treatment. A fragmented and decentralized system of twenty District Health Boards results in repetition and duplication with wasted spending on "unique solutions to common problems", disparate "stovepipe systems", and "widely different care paths for common conditions" according to a report by Deloitte.

A lack of national uniform IT and security strategy combines with moribund health IT computer systems across DHBs, and manual labour-intensive work practices by doctors and nurses to compound inefficiencies.

The reality is that much of the national health budget appears to be squandered on administrative overhead. In fact, according to the Deloitte study, "some OECD researchers have estimated that well over 2% of New Zealand’s GDP is wasted on administrative inefficiencies."

With budget deficits and almost no money to spend on security, an increasing number of people are concerned that the whole system could come crashing down. Cyber attacks on hospitals and primary care facilities in other countries have massively damaged already fragile health systems. Attacks have caused further delays to patients awaiting treatment and life sustaining operations. If nothing changes, then the same fate may befall New Zealand one day soon.

"Its not a matter of IF but WHEN a major cyber-attack will cause massive disruption to the country’s health sector" claims Scott Arrol, Chief Executive of NZ HealthIT (NZHIT).

But the security problem is not just one of sufficient funding, its also a one of prioritization and implementation of recommendations. The British National Health Service has many similarities to the New Zealand health model and is also chronically starved of resources. Out of date and out of support computer systems, combine with fragmented NHS Trusts to result in security vulnerabilities left unremediated, leaving much of the system open to attack when WannaCry struck in May last year.

According to the UK National Audit Office (NAO) more than a third of trusts in England were disrupted by the WannaCry ransomware, and at least 6,900 NHS appointments were cancelled as a result of the attack, 139 of which were considered urgent. NHS England data shows that at least 80 out of 236 trusts were affected – with 34 infected and locked out of devices. A further 603 primary care and other NHS organisations were infected by WannaCry, including 8 per cent of GP practices (595 out of 7,454).  No information has been published on the larger impact of the NHS outage including reduced patient outcomes or increased mortality, but one can only surmise that despite the best efforts of care givers, some patients were significantly impacted by the NHS's lack of security preparations.

The attack breached NHS Digital via open SMB holes in NHS firewalls and then spread quickly through thousands of unpatched Windows machines. Most infected systems ran Windows 7, but some 18% of systems were still running the no-longer supported Windows XP operating system, which went End of Life in April 2014, some 3 years earlier!

Securing healthcare delivery is not something that can be left on the side lines till next year, to a new budget, or a new administration. The potential impact on the population of a major cyber attack is too great. With the British NHS debacle as a recent example of what can happen if security is ignored, the New Zealand Ministry of Health needs to act now - before its too late!

New Zealand Healthcare steams forward with minimal security.  Photo: Stephen Crowley.

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2017: A Milestone Year for UAE

The American Hospital Dubai.

2017 was a watershed year for healthcare providers in the United Arab Emirates. Joint ventures with US, UK, European and other healthcare partners saw the start or completion of a number of large hospital construction projects, vastly expanding the number of beds and types of procedures that can be conducted throughout the emirate.

Partnerships with US-based Childrens' National Medical Center, The Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, MD Anderson, and the Mayo Clinic, have greatly helped improve care for UAE citizens, resident workers, and health tourists coming to the UAE for medical procedures.

Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi.

In fact health tourism is a major area of growth for both Dubai and Abu Dhabi. During a recent visit to the emirate, I was told that health tourism is on track to seeing 500,000 overseas medical tourists by 2021. Judging by the prolific amount of hospital construction evidenced during my visit and the apparent brain-drain of top physicians and healthcare administrators being lured from the west, the UAE is on track to become a major medical tourism destination.

A number of successful organ transplants took place this year including the first full heart transplant at the Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, the Basmah free cancer treatment initiative got underway and Dubai achieved mandatory health insurance for all its residents, as part of a UAE-wide initiative underway to health insure the entire country.

New Medcare Women and Children's Hospital in Dubai.

New hospital facilities ready to go.

UAE is a major Health Tourism destination.

Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi.

The deployment of UAE's electronic medical record system continues to help improve patient outcomes and some 1.4m Dubai residents now have ‘smart’ medical records. On top of all this, plans were agreed for 2,000 more nurses, midwives and allied health professionals to be recruited by the Department of Health, Abu Dhabi.

Saudi German Hospital, Dubai.

But all is not well in paradise. 2016 and 2017 were also watershed years for cyber crime in the United Arab Emirates. Studies suggest that compared to the rest of the world, UAE and its larger neighbour Saudi Arabia, are being targeted for attack and that this is beginning to impact both oil-rich nations.

A recent study by the Ponemon Institute shows that the average cost of a data breach in Saudi Arabia and the UAE in 2017 was $4.94 million (Dh18.1 million), up 6.9 per cent since 2016. These breaches on average cost organisations $154.70 per lost or stolen record on average. On top of that, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are amongst the top spenders ($1.43 million) on post-data breach response.

The 2017 Cost of Data Breach report also revealed that malicious or criminal attacks are the most frequent cause of data breach in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Fifty-nine per cent of incidents involved data theft or criminal misuse. These types of incidents cost companies $171.70 per compromised record, compared to $130.70 and $128.50 per compromised record as a result of a breach caused by system glitch or employee negligence, respectively.

Average cost of a data breach in UAE in 2017 was $4.94 million (Dh18.1 million)

Top factors that contributed to the increased cost of a data breach in Saudi Arabia and the UAE include compliance failures and the extensive use of mobile platforms.

Scott Manson, cybersecurity leader for the Middle East and Turkey at Cisco, said: "Cybersecurity is finally becoming a top-of-mind business objective for many with many organisations making the board hold accountability, which makes sense considering a large security breach/incident doesn't only affect finances and productivity, but can severely damage customers' trust towards the brand."

According to the study, how quickly an organisation can contain data breach incidents has a direct impact on financial consequences. Globally, the cost of a data breach was nearly $1 million lower on average for organisations that were able to contain a data breach in less than 30 days compared to those that took longer than that. On average, organisations in Saudi Arabia and the UAE took 245 days to identify a breach, and 80 additional days to contain a breach once discovered.

Most of the large recent security breaches in UAE have targeted financial institutions, but as banks continue to invest rapidly and heavily in security, so other UAE industries are becoming the focus of cyber criminals. That includes healthcare. With patient safety directly impacted by cybersecurity and system availability of critical treatment systems, hospitals have much more to lose in the event of a successful cyber attack. While none of the hospitals I recently visited had knowledge of a security breach, many executives acknowledged that it was only a question of time before their institution could be hit. While investment in UAE hospitals and clinics has been huge, most of the money to date, has been targeted at the direct delivery of clinical services to patients. Security and privacy have yet to catch up.

Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi.

As the healthcare industry in the UAE continues to develop and expand to a global provider of services to international patients, the emirate needs to invest heavily in cybersecurity and privacy capabilities to protect patient information and critical clinical information technology from cyber attack. Otherwise the huge investments in buildings, equipment and highly-skilled medical staff will all be for nothing.

Once those investments in cybersecurity controls and staff are in place, UAE will surely be on the top of many people's lists for elective medical procedures. After-all, who wouldn't want to recuperate in a luxury desert oasis!

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Beverly Hills Security Summit

Beverly Hills Security Summit CISO Forum. Photo: Tina Kitchen.

• What is it that keeps your CEO and Board up at night?


• How do you communicate cybersecurity risk to the Executive Leadership Team and the board, and do you talk to enterprise risk or just technology security risk?


• In planning to address ELT and board risk concerns, how are you going about the development of a security risk remediation plan?


• Have you considered the development and maintenance of a multi-year enterprise Security Roadmap and do you have anyone to help you in its development?


• What approaches work best at other healthcare entities and what can we all learn from one another?

Richard Staynings. Photo: Tina Kitchen.

These were just some of the discussion points between the assembled Chief Information Security Officers and other senior healthcare leaders during a Leadership Roundtable at the Beverly Hills Health IT Summit and Security Forum today.

The event was held at the Sofitel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills, and attracted several hundred CISOs, CIOs, COOs,  along with various Directors of Technology, Cybersecurity and Health Information Management.

The lunch was arranged and sponsored by Optum Security Solutions, part of Optum under the UnitedHealth Group umbrella, and was hosted by Optum's Tina Kitchen.

Mark Hagland, Editor and Chief at Healthcare Informatics, and Richard Staynings of the HIMSS Privacy and Security Committee led the discussion.

Institutional reputation remains one of the biggest concerns, particularly at high profile clinics attended by celebrities, but is the patient population becoming sufficiently jaded and numb to all of the breaches of health information to walk elsewhere? And if most other healthcare delivery outlets are impacted by security breaches then where do patients go? At the end of the day, law suits and restitution notwithstanding, we heard that patients want the best possible treatment they can afford, and will suffer through the diminished reputation of a clinic in order to receive that care and attention.

The complexity of large health systems, particularly as mergers and acquisitions drive even larger conglomerates, creates political and technological barriers to the implementation of enterprise-wide holistic security controls and causes duplication of effort and expense. Where management of these systems has not been consolidated and centralized, the Enterprise Chief Information Security Officer will have an especially hard time. Numerous divisional leaders including CIOs and COOs need to be consulted before new security controls can be implemented, and this task becomes even more daunting for the CISO in research or academic health where conflicting business drivers can seriously compound problems in access to PHI.

The frequency and magnitude of attacks against healthcare continues to climb, as well-funded and highly motivated attackers, be they nation states or criminal gangs, ply their craft at healthcare's expense. This is keeping all of us on our toes and stretching security in many hospitals to the limit. Understanding where threats are coming from and quickly identifying potential indicators of compromise is increasingly becoming a challenge and one where for healthcare, the need for help from specialist partners becomes increasingly evident.

Risk remediation needs to be targeted to the areas of greatest potential impact for each institution. Available resources simply don't allow for the remediation of all areas of weakness. The number of security resources available to security leaders is also a constraining factor and is leading to a dramatic increase in the consumption of managed security services from partners like Optum and others. This trend is set to continue as the availability of security resources becomes even more competitive and better-funded financial services organizations attract more and more healthcare security professionals.

Taking all these factors into account, we heard that the importance of an Enterprise Security Roadmap is becoming critical in not only security planning, but also for communication upwards of that plan to senior executives and the board. We also heard that Optum Security Solutions has had great success in helping healthcare customers to develop and maintain security roadmaps for a wide range of healthcare entities, and these have greatly helped reduce security risk and to stave off attacks.

• Read more about Optum Security, Privacy and Compliance


• Read more about Optum Managed Services

Overall the lunchtime session resulted in a full and frank exchange of ideas from assembled guests along with a better understanding of what seems to work best in a healthcare environment, where compliance, institutional reputation and patient safety all play a critical role.

Attendees included:

• Sriram Bharadwa, CISO, UC Irvine Health
• Carl Cammarata, CISO, Northwestern University - Feinberg School of Medicine
• Cris Ewel, CISO, UW Medicine
• Mark Hagland, Editor and Chief, Healthcare Informatics
• Norman Hibble, County of San Luis Obispo - Health Agency
• Chris Joerg, CISO, Cedars-Sinai
• Tina Kitchen, Sr. Solutions Executive, Optum
• Surya Mishra, IT Director, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association
• Olaf Neumann, CIO, Inland Behavioral and Health Services, Inc.
• Casie Phillips, Regional Manager, Healthcare Informatics
• Richard Staynings, HIMSS Privacy and Security Committee

Thanks to everyone for their participation and a great exchange of ideas.

Photo: Tina Kitchen.

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Securing Health IT Value

Richard Staynings kicks off the VA HIMSS Annual Conference.  Photo: David Stewart.

One of the fundamental conditions to deliver health IT value is security. Without it Health IT Systems cannot protect confidential data, validate the integrity of medical records, or ensure that clinicians can access IT systems in order to treat patients.

The recent WannaCry attack that took out part of the British NHS, and other ransomware attacks that have crippled hospitals all over the U.S. should be a wake-up call for healthcare leaders. Without security, health IT can be a liability rather than an asset. Furthermore, cybersecurity and patient safety are now inextricably joined at the hip.

Richard Staynings works the audience. Photo: David Stewart.

Emerging and new technologies will help drive the efficiency and security of Health IT, but their adoption or readiness for widespread production use, may be 3 to 5 years away. New technologies require planning and forethought, and not all of them will be suitable for everyone. Given the pace of change and the inability of many healthcare payers and providers to attract and retain top cybersecurity talent, alternative approaches to the consumption of these new capabilities may be necessary.

Rather than hire, build and integrate, it may be faster and more cost effective to procure capabilities as a service. This is particularly so in security where fierce competition to attract and retain cyber resources places the healthcare industry at a disadvantage compared to other better paying employers.

Keynoting VA HIMSS 17. Photo: David Stewart.

This was the theme of my keynote presentation today at the Virginia HIMSS Conference at the Kingsmill Resort in in Williamsburg, VA. attended by just under 400 of the Commonwealth’s healthcare technology leaders and those that help to keep them being successful.

Machines already outnumber Humans. Photo: David Stewart.

My keynote was followed up later in the day with a second High Impact Ted style talk on the changing face of security and IoT in a healthcare environment. I think I had everyone's undivided attention!

My special thanks for the VA HIMSS Executive Team for making me feel so welcome and for an extremely well planned and organized event. And what an idyllic location for a day of charity golfing followed by two days of educational conference! I'll have to remember this place. Your hospitality was inspiring as were all of the speakers who presented.

Richard Staynings, Cisco. Photo: Leigh Thomas Williams.

As promised, here are links to my decks. Feel free to leverage for your own graphically assisted conversations with your boards of directors / regents, and your executive leadership team.

• KeyNote
• Topical Talk

Anyone needing CPE credits here's your link

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HITSecurity Forum

Richard Staynings, HIMSS Privacy & Security Committee. Photo: Tina Kitchen.

‘Security is an industry where we are continually developing new solutions without understanding the problem we are trying to fix’.

This was the basis for a presentation I gave to the HIMSS Healthcare Security Forum today in Boston.

Richard Staynings presents new security technologies. Photo: Malissa O'Rourke Miot.

The session discussed the adoption of new and emerging tools and approaches to secure healthcare data and IT system availability. Tools like NGFW, Micro-Segmentation, Biometrics and MFA, Blockchain, Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning and AI. Tools that boost automation, protection, visibility, and intelligence, leading to improved threat detection, and containment of inevitable attacks.

Richard Staynings discusses new security tools. Photo: Tina Kitchen.

As with any new tool or approach, security leaders need to fully understand the costs, benefits and drawbacks before adoption, and how quickly, easily or difficult each tool can be integrated into the existing infrastructure. Furthermore, they need to be able to articulate and defend exactly what business risk gaps, each tool will address, what business benefits it will provide to the organization and what legacy tools it will retire.

As security leaders, we need to work smarter, not harder, and with an average 65 disparate security vendors in each US hospital, we need to consolidate to a smaller, leaner and more manageable toolbox.

Photo: Tina Kitchen.

Thanks to the attendees, sponsors and organizers of the HIMSS Media Healthcare Security Forum today in Boston.

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Understanding Medical Device Security

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 device subject to the recall, a cardiac rhythm management product, or “pacemaker” to the rest of us, is probably not an anomaly. Many other medical devices more than likely also lack adequate security.

To understand the risks, we first need to understand the problem. To be honest, this could require an extensive series of blog posts over weeks to fully examine and explain this properly, but here’s the 50,000-foot version.

Different types of medical devices and the risks they pose

First, there are the implantable medical devices (IMDs) like the medical pacemaker at the center of this story. This group of medical devices includes the implanted insulin pump that security researcher Barnaby Jack hacked live on stage at the Miami Hacker Halted Conference in 2011, reconfiguring the device to deliver a lethal drug dose. It also includes a pacemaker that was hacked, again by Jack, at the Melbourne BreakPoint Security Conference in 2012 to deliver a lethal 830 volt electric shock to a patient.

Second are the much wider range of network-attached medical devices used in healthcare delivery. These include:

• Diagnostic imaging systems: ultrasound, MRI, PET, CT scanners, and X ray machines 
• Treatment equipment: infusion pumps, medical lasers, and surgical machinery 
• Life support: ventilators, anesthetic and dialysis machines 
• Medical monitors for oxygen saturation, blood pressure, ECG and EEG, and many, many more. 

The greatest data-security risks for medical devices

Network-attached devices far outnumber implantable ones, but both have one thing in common—a very long life span! No one wants a pacemaker that needs to be replaced every couple of years, and hospitals simply can’t afford to rip and replace their multi-million-dollar investment in x-ray machines, and PET and CT scanners if they still work perfectly. Many current medical devices are 15 or 20 years old already, placed into service when the rest of us were deploying Windows 95 and dial-up modems.

The greatest risk to medical devices, however, is that many lack even the basic security protections that a $200 home PC has - things like antivirus software and a host firewall. The danger is that when a malware worm gets into a hospital and spreads its way laterally across the network to reach highly vulnerable medical devices, it either quickly infects them (many of the newer models run a form of Windows XP), or the malware multicast traffic storm causes the medical device to crash or just stop working. It’s not that someone hacked and changed a parameter - although that is a distinct possibility, but it’s more likely that its battery becomes quickly drained and powers off, or the system blue screens and ceases to provide life-sustaining care.

Understanding the Problem

You can't protect what you don't know about and most hospital systems have very little idea just how many medical devices they have on premise and how many attach to their wired or wireless network and therefore pose the highest risk. Or more importantly, how many of those devices contain PHI and are therefore subject to annual HIPAA Risk Assessment and OCR validation that a risk assessment has been conducted annually.

To manage a problem you first need to understand the problem. Performing an accurate and periodic or ongoing asset inventory is a first step. The difficulty is twofold however: medical devices do not just simply show up in a Windows Explorer or Finder view of the network, nor can they be actively scanned in many cases. Secondly, many devices are powered on as needed for patient care and powered off when not and returned to storage. So understanding exactly how many you have, what each does, and what versions of OS and software each is running, while at the same time trying to avoid double counting is not exactly easy.

What is needed is a way to passively monitor the network to identify typical medical device network traffic along with endpoint IP addresses, VLAN and physical location, and to perform some sort of profiling of devices including the identification and recording of unique device characteristics. Fortunately, there are tools and companies that do this now, so you don't need to reinvent the wheel.

Once an inventory is obtained you can identify potential weaknesses, known threats and vulnerabilities and evaluate probability and likelihood as you would for other IT devices subject to HIPAA Risk Analysis. Once you have identified your highest risk devices, you can set about patching or otherwise remediating risks, or implement compensating security controls till such time as a longer term solution can be implemented or the vulnerable assets retired and replaced. Unfortunately, most medical devices today exhibit some level of risk and older devices may prove to be more secure than newer ones thanks to obscure operating systems or firmware compared to today's COTS (commercial off the shelf) embedded OS versions.

How to reduce risk and protect devices

It’s going to take years to patch or replace the arsenal of insecure medical devices and billions of dollars that healthcare providers simply don’t have. So, we need to look at alternatives to secure them for the rest of their life-spans. This is best accomplished by the use compensating security controls, which doubles as an acceptable audit of risks as far as HIPAA and OCR are concerned.

By far the most effective approach is use of network access control (NAC) using microsegmentation, where medical devices are locked down and secured by the software defined network (SDN) they are attached to. (Attempting to manage 350,000 individual medical devices otherwise in a hospital is near impossible.)

Modern network infrastructure supports security technologies like Cisco TrustSec©, where each network port acts as a virtual firewall. Using security group tags (SGTs), and identity services engine (ISE), network traffic is controlled so that only specifically authorized users - biomedical equipment technicians (or BMETs, as they are known) - have access to reprogram devices, and these systems are only able to communicate with designated internal IP addresses using predetermined ports and protocols. The network will drop everything else, like malware traffic and any connection attempts from unauthorized users. Many of the more advanced healthcare providers have already adopted such an approach, and by employing compensating security controls like ISE and TrustSec have been able to secure their networked medical devices from attack at the click of a button.

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