Making medical IoT devices more secure with machine and deep learning

Even though smart medical devices are providing breakthrough improvements and reimagining patient experience, they open up vulnerabilities to new attacks and exploits that can disrupt hospital operations and put patients in danger.

With a 200% increase in cyberattacks in healthcare organizations and connected devices expected to hit 1.3 billion in this field, Palo Alto Networks Inc. changes the narrative of medical devices being the weakest link on the hospital network through machine learning, segmentation and deep learning, according to Anand Oswal (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of product at Palo Alto.

“Through a lot of innovation that we’ve done in both machine learning and deep learning to be able to look at unstructured data and be able to stop the attacks in-line in real time, you need to use machine learning to identify what these devices are, what’s the unpatched vulnerabilities,” Oswal stated. “Then you need do segmentation … about who can talk to whom. Should your CT scan machine or MRI machine be talking to a server in the corporate environment or to your point of sale terminal in the hospital?”

Oswal spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante at Ignite ’22, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Palo Alto is helping to secure the healthcare sector through cutting-edge technologies such as machine and deep learning. (* Disclosure below.)

Stopping attacks in real time

Since attackers are using more sophisticated methods to evade traditional sandboxing techniques, Oswal believes machine learning comes in handy in averting threats in real time. This is based on the repetitive nature of malware.

“Ninety-five percent of all malware in the world is more of malware, which means it’s variations of existing malware,” he pointed out. “We invested a lot in machine learning and deep learning to stop these day-zero threats in-line in real time. Attackers are using that window of opportunity so you have to out-innovate them.”

Revamping legacy networks in the healthcare sector is crucial for enhanced security. Moreover, the zero-trust policy should be incorporated, according to Oswal.

“Majority of healthcare organizations have legacy security architectures,” he said. “You need to get fully integrated, because you need to reduce their operational costs. You need to ensure that they have better security. You wanna have least privilege access.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Ignite ’22:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Ignite ’22. Neither Palo Alto Networks Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE