Legacy Systems in Healthcare: The Ticking Time Bomb

Walk into a modern hospital, and you notice the change immediately. The shiny new patient monitoring systems aren’t what’s most unsettling on the screens. Computers running software from the 2000s sit there just fine, thanks. State-of-the-art surgical robots are wired into networks with systems that still need floppy disks to be updated. Unbelievably, yes—but this, unfortunately, is the reality. And while it presents some intricate security challenges, there are sound methods available to help secure these vital systems if healthcare organizations take the right steps.

Healthcare organizations are operating on a patchwork of aging and modern technologies—and they were never meant to work together. Some of these systems are so old that the companies that developed them no longer exist. Hospitals can’t just get rid of them and start over. But fortunately, with the right experience and expertise, legacy systems can be made secure while healthcare organizations work on more permanent fixes.

Why Healthcare Can’t Just Replace Everything

Hospital technology isn’t like technology in the home, which is the first thing most people don’t understand. That ugly old system in the corner may control something crucial, like an MRI machine or a patient monitoring system. These devices can run into the millions and need to last from 15 to 20 years old—or much longer.

But the system powering the device? It was built at a time when nobody thought of connecting medical devices to the internet. Hundreds, if not thousands, of hospital devices around the United States still operate on Windows XP, which Microsoft abandoned in 2014. Some are even older and haven’t had a single security update in over a decade.

Things get even more complicated, though, when you factor in the FDA. These devices need years of safety testing before they can be used. Once a device is approved for market use, any major change in its hardware or software requires a fresh approval process. This can take months or even years of testing and costs millions of dollars. So this is why specialized expertise should be considered an essential resource.

Assessing the Challenge

Legacy systems were never designed to be updated with the latest security measures. When most were created, the idea was that they would work and be safe. Cybersecurity was never on the radar. Legacy systems have a false sense of security with minimal encryption, minimal password protection, and minimal authentication requirements. And for a good reason. These were the industry standards when they were designed.

The situation is much more complicated for network-enabled legacy systems. These systems were always intended to operate in isolation. They are now part of a hospital network that connects hundreds of medical devices to the internet. A device that was relatively secure sitting alone in a hospital room is now much more vulnerable after being networked along with thousands of other devices on the same infrastructure.

Specialized knowledge can make a crucial difference here. Healthcare organizations that have access to a firm like Blue Goat Cyber can assess where their vulnerabilities lie and create a sophisticated network protection architecture that carefully considers the age-related vulnerabilities of their protected medical devices.

Intelligent Solutions for Complex Challenges

Replacement is a non-starter for most healthcare organizations, so the next best thing is smart protection. Network segmentation is one of the best ways to protect medical devices against network-based attacks.

Network segmentation separates devices onto different networks so that if one network fails, the whole hospital doesn’t stop working. Think of it this way: What if you built heavily fortified sections of your infrastructure that your old devices could safely work in without posing any threat to their newer counterparts?

Hospitals can put legacy systems behind state-of-the-art firewalls and restrict their network activity to what they need to work on their new networks. With the right expertise, this architecture will provide good protection without having to replace all your vital medical devices.

While this may not sound like a very elegant solution, virtual patching has proved to be highly effective as an alternative to physical patching systems that might not be able to accommodate any changes that have been made to legacy devices due to their age. Security professionals can implement layers of protection on legacy systems that block known attack vectors without alerting operators from their healthcare provider networks.

The excellent news is that investing in good security technology yields relatively quick results. Healthcare providers that integrate professional cybersecurity services can secure their expensive medical devices using cost-effective infrastructure. The cost of professional cybersecurity services is much cheaper than having to replace expensive legacy systems that play a vital role in monitoring patients while they are in hospital care.

Preventing Future Breaches With Expert Help

The success stories in this space have one thing in common: healthcare organizations that used expert help rather than trying to handle their vulnerabilities themselves experienced far lower compromise rates as their legacy cybersecurity architecture continued to age.

Healthcare organizations that are still experiencing significant life extension for their legacy equipment sought specialized expert help long before they could visibly observe the compromise of their operational systems.

Some of the best practices to consider when trying to protect aging medical operational systems is to ensure that you are assessed for your network vulnerabilities long before hackers get their hands on your infrastructure.

Healthcare organizations that work with experts will find themselves better equipped by layered solution-building efforts that create pathways for both legacy and newer operational machines to co-exist and operate well within their infrastructure

Organizations can also find themselves co-existing with regularly scheduled checks for infrastructure that may have been modernized yet is still aging. Healthcare organizations with professionally skilled experts will receive assistance in reading patterns on their dashboards and spotting security threats before they become widespread attacks on their now aging infrastructure.

Institutionalization of investments in legal and organizational infrastructures will help healthcare facilities receive repayment if they face an attack that affects their operational infrastructure or their patients’ protected healthcare information.

Better yet, expert help can do so effectively.

Healthcare providers are more likely to receive positive coverage from their insurance providers if they can demonstrate how well they have fortified their infra against cyber threats.

Building Towards a Solution

Healthcare organizations are developing better cohabitation of aging technological infrastructures than they were even five years ago. Instead of waiting for legacy infrastructures to blow up in their face, organizations are adopting a more proactive approach to legacy infrastructure management.

Healthcare organizations are learning how to assess what operational aspect of their organization needs replacing first by considering several factors: How active? How accessible? What type of patients? How dependent are patients on certain devices? What would it cost? How easy would it be to replace?

Healthcare facilities are also learning how to build protective architectures that accommodate legacy operational aspects of their infrastructure as well as newer models.

In some cases, new regulatory frameworks around device security are providing these infrastructures with motivation to develop down this path by encouraging manufacturers to factor in longer-term security before they can approve and distribute devices or scanning machines that may still hold sensitive information about patients or operators.

Healthcare facilities are also beginning to learn how to evaluate the built-in levels of security that a device has before they invest in it through competent operating professionals.

The average level of security across the industry is improving despite the presence of legacy threats.

Insurance firms may have developed motivation to strengthen networks by only recognizing good options if they will cover practices in a way that’s profitable for them if they can illustrate that they have effectively mitigated their infrastructures against cyber threats.

Facilities that provide firms with proof of expert assistance that managed to successfully remedy threats can become a viable insurance option under better circumstances if they create disaster response plans that help insurance companies predict what damage might look like depending on the situations that arise.

Towards the Future

There are significant challenges when it comes to aging infrastructures in modernized medical centers—but thanks to focused solutions, these challenges are not insurmountable if they are tackled through layered approaches of planning, specialized practice, and monitoring.

Future-proofing healthcare organizations is still possible, and legacy infrastructures do not have to be a threat. Professional assistance who understand both healthcare organizations and the way cyberthreats operate in modern today’s cybersecurity landscape will ensure that environments with aging infrastructures often critical to operational success can still be maintained well, as plans focus on what it takes to eventually phase out legacy infrastructures as they become unusable for modern use cases.