Press Release – How to counter cyber-physical threats to Healthcare Infrastructure

On Monday 1^st of February, 2021 the SAFECARE Project Consortium held its 2nd Awareness Event with the aim of presenting the main results achieved within the project. SAFECARE (GA number 787002) is an EU-funded project designed to provide solutions that will improve physical and cyber security in a seamless and cost effective way.

The event was chaired by Mr. Philippe Tourron, from the Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Marseille and Coordinator of the project, and it represented a unique opportunity to gain an in-depth knowledge from, and also to contribute to, the discussions on key technological trends, best practices, emerging threats and other relevant issues in the sector of Healthcare Infrastructure security. The event reached more than 90 participants and brought together members from the Industry, Academia and end-users.

During the first part of the event, key speakers from the cyber and physical security field provided insightful presentations covering different topics. After Dr. Isabel Praca’s (ISEP) project overview, Dr. Athanasios Drougkas (ENISA) provided an interesting presentation on cybersecurity in healthcare and ENISA activities. Dr. Georgios Theodoridis’ (JRC) presentation focused on critical infrastructures protection, and particularly on the latest threats and approaches emerged in this field.  Lastly, Mrs. Nina Olesen (ECSO) provided a detailed presentation of the policy context in healthcare and cyber-physical systems. The second part of the event was dedicated to the demonstrations of SAFECARE security solutions. This was of crucial importance as it allowed all the participants to directly explore the new technologies and the novel approaches promoted by the project’s consortium in order to enhance threat prevention, threat detection, incident response and mitigation of impacts in a healthcare environment. Mr. David Lancelin (AIRBUS Cybersecurity) and Dr. Barry Norton (Milestone Systems A/S) provided technical demonstrations of, respectively, cyber and physical security solutions developed within the SAFECARE project, while Mr. Francesco Lubrano (LINKS foundation) provided a detailed demonstration of integrated cyber-physical security solutions in a healthcare environment. These demonstrations did not only include the presentation of the final tool, but also the presentation of the main procedural and technical aspects that have been taken into account in order to achieve it.

The final part of the event consisted of an interactive roleplay session, held by Mr. Philippe Tourron, covering potential security topics encountered during a hospital’s daily operation practice. Various interactive questionnaires were shared among the participants through a common chat to collect crisis management reactions and solutions on how to protect the Covid-19 vaccine process during an attack simulation (e.g. detection methods, mitigation measures and respective impacts to the patients’ care). Once the answers received, these were collected and processed in order to extract the main results, which were in turn immediately shared and analysed. Although all the answers were anonymised, this interactive session allowed the participants to exchange relevant insights on healthcare infrastructure security solutions and to better know about each other.

The event concluded with a fruitful discussion and questions section managed by Dr. Vasiliki Mantzana (KEMEA), which allowed the participants to ask for further information about the SAFECARE security solutions presented throughout the event.