Cambridge Wireless Event: Digital Security in Healthcare

Konnektis were at a Cambridge Wireless Healthcare SIG event last week that took place at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge.

Security is a priority at Konnektis and we attended this informative event to ensure that it remains so. With a number of speakers from both technological and healthcare backgrounds, it was an educational afternoon that discussed how to approach security and digital innovation in the healthcare sector.

Jon Hill (InVMA Ltd) and Caroline Rivett (KPMG) both spoke about the challenges involved in protecting medical devices and the approaches to lowering the risk of attack, with Michelle Ellerbeck (Cambridge University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust) outlining the impact GPDR will have on UK health companies.

Jon Hill accurately captured the tone of these talks, where speakers urged the importance of proactive, end-to-end, professionally supervised protection strategies, saying:

“Hope is not a strategy (and not legally recognised).”

Hugo Vincent from Arm Research spoke about the security challenges that medical devices face over other IoT devices, stating that “100% security does not exist”, and that to reduce risk security must be incorporated during the design phase of a product:

“Security is a system design requirement, not a feature to be added later.”

He also spoke about the debate surrounding ‘movie plot threats’, such as the firmware update of pacemakers, and XAI, or ‘Explainable Artificial Intelligence’, as an emerging solution to the problem that deep learning AI can be easily f