The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, which happens to be the agency of the Department of Health and Human Services- HHS has gone on to setup a new cybersecurity program that looks to elevate and also automate cybersecurity within US hospitals so as to make sure of continuity when it comes to patient care.
The mission of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health is to speed up better health outcomes by way of supporting development when it comes to high-impact solutions to society’s very challenging health issues, and one of the most far-fetched problems that are faced by hospitals is cybersecurity. It is well to be noted that healthcare cyberattacks go on to take crucial systems offline and, at the same time, adversely affect patient care, thereby resulting in healthcare facilities closure.
In order to help tackle the issues, ARPA-H has gone ahead and launched the Universal PatchinG and Remediation for Autonomous DEfense- UPGRADE Program which is going to be investing more than $50 million when it comes to the creation of software tools that will enable the IT teams within hospitals to defend their respective networks against cyberattacks.
The fact is that hospitals happen to be having a massive array of internet-connected devices. All these need to be kept completely patched as well as up-to-date but updating the software so as to fix susceptibilities means that one will have to take the device offline, which may as well be disruptive.
When the patches happen to be released to fix the known-vulnerabilities, it can also take months before they are applied. There are many who have actively gone on to support internet-connected devices, which can be susceptible for over a year, and the legacy devices within hospitals can remain vulnerable much longer. The UPGRADE Program looks to better as well as automate cybersecurity by way of software tool development that can be used to browse through hospital ecology in connection to the vulnerabilities that can as well be potentially exploited by hackers and rapidly develop and also roll out mitigations so as to prevent the susceptibilities from getting exploited. But modeling hospitals is an issue, as each hospital happens to have a distinct number as well as an array of devices.
According to Andrew Carney, Program Manager for UPGRADE, it is especially challenging to model all the intricacies of the software systems that are used in a particular healthcare facility, and this issue can leave hospitals as well as clinics very much open to ransomware attacks. With UPGRADE in picture, they are looking out to reduce the efforts it goes on to take to safeguard the hospital equipment as well as guarantee that the devices are safe as well as functional so that healthcare providers can go on to stress on patient care.
In order to make sure of the UPGRADE program’s success, ARPA-H will work on the expertise of the IT staff, healthcare providers, cybersecurity experts, vendors as well as medical device manufacturers, and also others so as to help develop a customized and scalable software suite when it comes to enhancing cyber resilience.
The software will go on to probe models of the digital hospital environments so as to identify the weaknesses of the software, and when in case the vulnerabilities are identified, it will go ahead and develop or procure a patch that will be tested within the model environment so it can get rolled out with very minimal interruption as far as hospital devices are concerned. The idea is to lessen the time of the vulnerability of the devices from many months to just a few days.
Under the aegis of the UPGRADE program, ARPA-H is looking out for proposals from the performer teams pertaining to four technical areas: development when it comes to high-fidelity digital twins of hospital equipment, creation of a vulnerability mitigation software platform, methods in terms of auto-detecting susceptibilities, and also auto-developing the custom defenses.
As per the Deputy Secretary of the HHS, Andrea Palm, this launch is another instance of the HHS’s consistent commitment when it comes to enhancing cyber resilience throughout the healthcare system. UPGRADE from ARPA-H will aid in building on the healthcare cyber security strategy of HHS to make sure that all the hospital systems, be they big or small, are able to function in a more secure way and also adapt to the continuously evolving landscape.
