Hospitals are still an attractive target for criminal hackers, also because they are still consideres soft targets. The attacks have different objectives, one of them is to gain access to individual health, medical and personal data. Patients can thus be more or less directly harmed.

As a nurse, Jelena is facing these challenges daily. She sees vulnerability on all levels and in all roles and locations in the hospital – in software, devices, and with humans. The consequences can be severe and harm patients, employees and the hospital itself. The reasons are manifold, e.g. stressed healthcare workers with limited interest in IT security, poorly equipped IT departments, missing updates, ignorance, organisational shortcomings in the hospitals .

We need to understand why IT security in hospitals is so fragmentary. We also need to understand the working conditions in hospitals and the needs of the healthcare workers. We need to understand the system and the processses and how medical devices and computers are connected. We need to think about innovations and IoT, e-health, digital and smart hospitals.

Jelena will show a lot of examples and discuss with Brigitte and the audience how to create awareness so that we can build a safe and secure IT environment in hospitals.