Almost 50% of more than 14,000 internet-exposed healthcare device and medical system IP addresses around the world were from the U.S., making it the leading country in terms of vulnerable healthcare IPs far ahead of second place India, reports CyberScoop.
Such elevated prevalence of online devices in the U.S. has been attributed to the highly decentralized nature of its health system, a report from Censys revealed. Moreover, Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine, or DICOM, leveraged for the transmission of medical imaging accounted for most of the online devices, most of which had no VPNs or firewalls, followed by electronic medical records and electronic health records. Additional findings showed lacking cybersecurity practices in health providers worldwide, as evidenced by the elevated use of residential internet service providers among many smaller health entities, as well as the ubiquity of misconfiguration and unencrypted connections.
