GE Healthcare's medical devices are vulnerable to cyber attacks

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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a warning for healthcare providers, hospitals and patients, in a document published on January 23, 2020, concerning a vulnerability present on certain equipment manufactured by GE Healthcare.

The flaw would affect some patient monitoring stations and telemetry servers. These medical machines are used to remotely monitoring the patient's blood pressure, heart rate, temperature and condition. They are generally located in the central part of the healthcare establishment, close to the nursing stations.

Tampering with medical devices

According to the American regulator, this flaw could allow a person to alter the devices by doing "silence alarms, generate false alarms or even interfere with alarms from patient monitors smart health connected to these devices", says the document. The FDA indicates that it has not identified any"adverse event"linked to the vulnerabilities observed, and that it is a company specialized in cybersecurity which has found the flaw.

GE Healthcare is expected to release a fix to the vulnerabilities soon, but in the meantime, the FDA advises facility owners to disconnect equipment from the hospital network, restrict access to monitoring stations, change passwords, and to create firewalls to fight against intrusion attempts.

The FDA takes these threats very seriously

"The FDA takes any potential vulnerabilities in medical devices very seriously and will continue to work with GE Healthcare (…) and will keep the public informed in the event of new important information"The document said. Conscious of these challenges, in April 2018, the American authority created a team dedicated to these issues. The IoT has opened up great prospects in the medical sector but also poses many cybersecurity issues. computer failure on a smart health connected medical device can have dramatic consequences.

In France, health authorities are faced with the same problems. In July 2019, the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM) launched a public consultation on a draft recommendation for the cybersecurity of medical devices. The ANSM seeks to change the regulations on this subject so that the manufacturers of smart health connected medical devices are more supervised and is counting on the European Commission so that the framework changes quickly.

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