An Investigation of Vulnerabilities in Internet of Health Things

Medical devices are the machines or instruments that play a vital role in diagnosis or treatment for patients in a healthcare ecosystem. As technologies advances so are these medical devices, and with time they are getting smarter and interconnected to themselves and other devices. These smarter devices attract attracts hackers to launch cyber-attack against these machines targeting vulnerabilities that exist within them. In this paper, we provide a brief description of medical devices in relation to different regulatory bodies, through which we try to understand the need to make the medical device safe for the users. We explore the vulnerabilities of medical devices and how they may be exploited to infiltrate the full healthcare system and other devices in the network. The paper covers three recent incidents of medical device vulnerabilities and explores the concept of blockchain that may be used to limit the vulnerabilities and their limitation. To ensure patient safety and privacy, it is essential that all relevant bodies including manufacturers, regulators, healthcare providers, etc. understand the risk and take proper steps to limit the threats.