NHS Princess Alexandra Hospital - how attack exposure technology strengthened cybersecurity

Discovering twice as many devices on its network that it didn't know about—and which could therefore offer a back door to hackers or ransomware bad actors determined to extort money from vulnerable healthcare providers—is just one of the benefits UK NHS Trust Princess Alexandra Hospital says it has received from a move to attack exposure technology.

The Trust's Deputy Director of ICT, Jeffrey Wood, says,

Due to the proliferation of connected medical devices and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), we expected to find things we didn't expect—and we did see things in the results like connected coffee machines and even the odd Sony PlayStation or two doctors were using to relax at the end of shift.

But the sheer number was a surprise—especially when we saw that some were connected to external servers we had no idea about.

Use of a specialized ...