Most resources of healthcare institutions are used for providing patient care, hence reducing what is needed to ensure cybersecurity. It is also challenging to implement many of the cybersecurity policies and authentication procedures since there are many users who rotate within the hospital. The fact that not all hospitals have a dedicated cybersecurity team is also noteworthy.

Trend Micro researchers, in a recent paper, zeroes in on two specific risks healthcare providers are susceptible to and need to be given more attention to: internet-exposed devices and supply chain threats.

The researchers have discovered that utilizing the IoT search engine, Shodan, the exposed medical systems, industrial controllers, healthcare software interfaces, protocols and databases that shouldn't be available to the public.

Pharmacy management software was yet another medical system that they found, was exposed online.

Supply Chain Attacks

Several entry points exist which can be used by threat actors to compromise the hospital supply chain ranging from manufacturers to distribution centers. The researchers also pointed out that outsourcing suppliers and lack of verifiable cybersecurity practices in place at the suppliers lead to supply chain threats.

Supporting and as a means to help those managing healthcare organizations’ cybersecurity efforts the researches pointed out the typical cyberattack vectors in critical systems of hospitals and calculated the risk ratings for these vectors by applying the industry-standard standard DREAD (Damage Potential, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected Users, and Discoverability) threat model,

They also advised on ways to preparing adequate defenses based on the HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF). This included both technical and non-technical recommendations, along with pointers on managing supply chain threats.