Towards Hospital Dynamics Model in the Age of Cybercrime

Abstract

In the age of today’s cybercrime, security offenders often act on the pursuit of financial advantage, as well as espionage or political intent. In the healthcare scenario, such acts can be extremely dangerous, since sensitive data from thousands of patients are constantly collected, transmitted and stored in hospital infrastructure. In this complex ecosystem, any miscalculated criminal act can induce in cascade of errors than could lead to wrong treatments to patients and even death. Therefore, it is important to understand holistically the entire data flow from the hospital point of view, from wireless medical devices to datacenter connectivity that manages patient information. In this paper, we present a novel way to tackle this problem, by providing ways to explore the big picture, using the so called, system dynamics model to capture a systemic view of hospital infrastructure components and their relations. Our goal is to improve hospital security policies, by simulating security scenarios under the dynamic model, and find out bottlenecks, and improvement points that could be applied. A case study was carried out based on a real hospital documentation and a model was created and executed on a system dynamics simulation tool. The results showed security abuse cases by attacking the hospital ecosystem, the interrelation of different components and the lessons learned to improve the security policies.