Stephanie Domas is executive vice president of research at MedSec in Columbus, OH, where she leads the development of services and products to improve the cybersecurity of health technology. Attacks and threats from hackers have increased in the healthcare sector since the COVID-19 crisis took hold this spring. Cybercriminals are pouncing on security weaknesses caused by the rapid increase in the number of networked devices at healthcare facilities as well as the number of healthcare professionals using home computers to access hospital and patient data. Unfortunately, a lot of hackers are not good people, said Stephanie Domas, executive vice president of research at MedSec in Columbus, OH, and a certified ethical hacker. "They are taking advantage of the chaos created by healthcare's response to COVID-19. The pandemic has led to a loosening, due to time constraints, of many of the cybersecurity procedures that normally protect healthcare security and data." According to Domas, a member of several medical device cybersecurity standards working groups, the primary cybersecurity challenge for hospitals remains understanding the medical devices in use, where they are, and what they are doing on the network. However, this is becoming increasingly difficult to do because hospitals are pressured to quickly acquire and put online new equipment to keep up with admissions. In many cases, these facilities are functioning at or beyond capacity, forcing hospitals to set up make-shift clinics and to repurpose areas that were not originally designed to be emergency rooms or intensive care units.
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