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Do No Harm
Protecting Connected Medical Devices, Healthcare, and Data from Hackers and Adversarial Nation States
Matthew Webster
Introduction
Along with the expanding challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic was another pandemic hitting our hospitals and healthcare systems in the United States—ransomware. Ransomware is software that cybercriminals use to render a computer or machine unusable. They then demand a ransom for a code that will (ideally) enable the compromised organization to disable the software and restore the machine to a usable state. The vulnerabilities and the weaknesses inherent in internet-connected medical devices helps to enable these cybercriminals.
This book is about the relationships between vulnerable internet-connected medical devices, cybercriminals, and nation-state actors and how they not only take advantage of exceptionally vulnerable devices, but also profit from it.
But the story relating to insecure medical devices is much deeper than this. It is the story of American innovation and ingenuity—a story where cybersecurity often takes a back seat to the needs of saving human lives. That story, through no particular person's or organization's fault, has started to leave our hospitals in a more vulnerable state than ever before. Through the pandemic, the fundamental flawed state of many internet-connected medical devices, along with insufficient global legal protections, has allowed organized crime and nation-state actors to collect trillions of dollars.
If you care about your data, your privacy, and why the situation is so dire from a cybersecurity perspective, this book is worth reading. It also offers a glimpse inside the perspective of a Chief Information Security Officer regarding the security and privacy of our data as a result of the decisions we have collectively made.
This book leans heavily on the cybersecurity perspective, as that is the perspective I know best. It does dive into the technical aspects of internet-connected medical devices, but then it jumps into law, big data, and other global challenges and ties them together in an overarching