New cybersecurity threats with potential to impact health care industry identified

On January 4, 2018, the National Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (NH-ISAC) posted an announcement regarding the cybersecurity threats Meltdown and Spectre that were recently identified. These threats are unique as they affect hardware, specifically processors that may be in medical devices among other systems, rather than software, making a fix more difficult. Hospitals should refer to the information posted by NH-ISAC and US-CERT on these threats and the corrective actions recommended to ensure that their cybersecurity teams are monitoring and addressing these issues.