“Medical care is the next cyber warfare.”
Janine Medina, a technologist, stated Thursday at a panel on the cybersecurity issues posed by the rampant proliferation of Internet-connected medical and anatomical-embedded devices.
These panellists are joined together at the Atlantic Council to discuss how “Internet of Bodies” devices could cause security backlashes and perils. The discussion involved the context of elite attacks using the internet and massive breaches such as that of Equifax.
Medina with a joint statement of co-panelist Andrea Matwyshyn speculated that the growing alliance of Internet of Things devices implanted into human anatomy for medical purposes could allow the vulnerability and penetrability of individuals, corporations, and agencies systems. Their products and development platforms did not consider security as a primary tenet.
To the IOT’s ubiquity, one analysis suggests there are now some 8.4 billion IoT devices, predicted to expand to 20.4 billion by 2020.
“The legal and technological challenges of the Internet of Things will transfer into this Internet of Bodies,” Matwyshyn elaborated, “particularly the challenges we’ve faced concerning rampant security vulnerabilities in the Internet of Things.”
These devices, from chips to comprehend the senses, pacemaker, fitness gauges, hearing aids and such can be a portal to attacks. Hackers can penetrate into it through botnets, utilized to contribute enormous amounts of processing and manipulative authority to seize websites. Apparently, Mirai botnet attack which happened last October pinned down Twitter, Spotify, and Paypal using a bandwagon of IoT devices reverted to anarchy.
With strategies the Internet of Bodies could be misused still resting in ambiguity, Terell McSweeny- federal trade commissioner and panel member expressed his disdain. “I think the FTC has been doing a terrific job with the existing authority that it has, doing the best that it can do to try to protect consumers in our increasingly connected economy and the world, but I think it needs additional authorities,” McSweeny explained.
McSweeney insisted that a comprehensive privacy legislation is implemented to ensure the safekeeping of patient’s confidential medical data and information collated and intercepted by these devices. “And I think we need civil penalty authority,” McSweeny added, “because I believe we need a bigger stick.”
However, according to Craig Peterson, IT Guru and TechTalk host, thinks that “it is the companies themselves that should work harder to implement security in their designs and not rely upon government regulation to assure the safety of their products.”
Government regulation, as observable, can never keep up with the pace of technology.
