Cyber-attacks and threats for healthcare – a multi-layer thread analysis

Abstract

Due to the advent of novel technologies and digital opportunities allowing to simplify user lives, healthcare is increasingly evolving towards digitalization. This represent a great opportunity on one side but it also exposes healthcare organizations to multiple threats (both digital and not) that may lead an attacker to compromise the security of medial processes and potentially patients' safety. Today technical cybersecurity countermeasures are used to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data and information systems - especially in the healthcare domain. This paper will report on the current state of the art about cyber security in the Healthcare domain with particular emphasis on current threats and methodologies to analyze and manage them. In addition, it will introduce a multi-layer attack model providing a new perspective for attack and threat identification and analysis.