Survey Design and Methodology of a Universal Cybersecurity Toolkit and a Thread Architecture for Intelligent Healthcare Business Applications

Hospitals and care centres are prime targets for cyber criminals, especially concerning data theft, denial-of-service and ransomware. This reflects the need of Healthcare Institutions for a Holistic Cyber Security vulnerability assessment toolkit, which will be able to proactively assess and mitigate cyber-security threats known or unknown, imposed by devices and services within a corporate ecosystem. This chapter elaborates on a toolkit that provides an automated zero-touch device and service verification to be easily adapted or embedded on existing, medical, clinical or health available infrastructures, whereas a user/admin is able to choose from a number of available security services. The proposed toolkit also enables service providers to specify complete services and sell or advertise these through a secure and easy to use interface. The chapter presents the toolkit architecture and the methodology that follows to be validated through pan-European scenarios, among three different countries (Romania, Portugal and Greece). Hospitals, care centres and device manufacturers participating in the project’s pilots deploy and evaluate the solution at business as usual and emergency situations. Moreover, this chapter presents the results of the regular reviews performed on all pilot sites in terms of their characteristics, operations and settings that affect the deployment and operation of the toolkit. In addition, the chapter establishes the baseline of the cybersecurity awareness level at each of the pilot sites, involving both the staff of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) departments and the remaining professionals working at the pilot sites. Finally, the ICT infrastructure of the pilot sites is described, as well as its critical assets associated to prevailing business processes and daily operations, requiring protection.