Recent years have seen dramatic growth in the use of connected medical devices, collectively called the internet of medical things. From MRIs to heart monitors to insulin pumps, medical devices are increasingly communicating with each other, with networked hospital systems, with electronic medical record operations and with other agents via the internet.
U.S. hospitals are already using an average of 10 to 15 connected medical devices per bed. In total, Forbes reports, some 3.7 million connected devices are in use today. By 2020, there will be 20 billion to 30 billion such devices in use, according to a projection from Frost & Sullivan.
The rapid uptake of these technologies is not surprising: device connectedness has the potential to transform medicine by allowing for better patient and health monitoring. But along with IoMT’s transformative potential comes a host of new cybersecurity risks. By virtue of their connectivity (for example, trusted internal network access), these devices are exposed to the larger IT environment. The FDA has reported that an average of 164 cyber threats are detected per thousand IoMT devices….
