BUSINESS TECH | Palo Alto Networks expands IoT security to healthcare
The new IoT solution uses machine learning, crowd-sourced telemetry and MDS2 data, allowing quick and accurate profiling devices to stop threats before any harm is done.
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Global cybersecurity experts Palo Alto Networks has announced a comprehensive Internet of Things (IoT) Security solution that significantly simplifies the challenges of safeguarding medical devices. The new IoT solution uses machine learning, crowd-sourced telemetry and MDS2 data, allowing quick and accurate profiling devices to stop threats before any harm is done.
In securing the Internet of Medical Things, Palo Alto’s IoMT Security implements ML-powered visibility, prevention and enforcement, that offers deep insights on healthcare-specific devices and vulnerabilities. This helps improve data security and patient safety as it meets the needs of both IT and clinical engineering teams. In the end, healthcare organizations derive maximum benefits from a transformative technology while reducing risks to patients and their data.
IoT has opened the door for innovative new services across industries, but it is also widely known that it presents new cybersecurity risks. This is particularly true in healthcare.
The 2020 IoT Report from Palo Alto’s Unit 42 revealed 83% of medical imaging devices are running on unsupported operating systems, making them potential avenues that cyber criminals can exploit. Some IoT vulnerabilities can be life-threatening, while other types attack critical enterprise functions or exfiltrate confidential data.
The 2020 Unit 42 Report found that, while the vulnerability of IoT devices make them easy targets, they are most often used as a stepping stone for lateral movement to attack other systems on the network. Furthermore, password-related attacks continue to be prevalent on IoT devices due to weak manufacturer-set passwords and poor password security practices.
The Report also underscored a shift away from the hackers’ primary motivation of running botnets to conduct DDoS attacks via IoT devices to malware spreading across the network via worm-like features, enabling cyber criminals to run malicious code to conduct a large variety of new attacks.
Palo Alto Networks IoT Security is the industry’s only solution to use machine learning and crowd-sourced telemetry to quickly and accurately profile all devices on the network, even those never seen before. IoT Security also offers ML-powered policy recommendations to reduce manual effort; intrusion prevention to block exploits; sandboxing to detect and prevent IoT malware; and URL and DNS security to prevent IoT attacks via the web.
