Understanding Cybersecurity Management in Healthcare: Challenges, Strategies and Trends

Digital technology is increasingly used in the healthcare sector, and healthcare organizations handle sensitive and confidential information that needs to be kept secure and protected. Therefore, the importance of cybersecurity in healthcare cannot be overstated. Cyber threats can compromise patient data, disrupt healthcare services, and put personal safety at risk. This book provides an understanding of cybersecurity in healthcare, which is crucial for protecting personal information, ensuring compliance with regulations, maintaining patient trust, and preventing cyber-attacks. Before defining cybersecurity in healthcare, the authors introduce the healthcare environment and cybersecurity basics to readers. They then emphasize the importance of data protection and privacy, software, and personal cybersecurity. Also, they highlight the importance of educating staff about cybersecurity. The discussion continues with data and information security in healthcare, including data threats and vulnerabilities, the difference between data protection and privacy, and how to protect data. Afterward, they focus on the software system frameworks and types of infra-security and app security in healthcare. A key goal of this book is to provide readers with an understanding of how to detect and prevent cyber-attacks in the healthcare sector and how to respond to and recover from them. Moreover, it gives them an insight into cybersecurity vulnerabilities in healthcare and how they are mitigated. A chapter on cybersecurity ethics and healthcare data governance frameworks is also included in the book. The last chapter explores the challenges healthcare organizations face in maintaining security compliance and security practice guidelines that exist. By understanding the risks and challenges of cybersecurity in healthcare, healthcare providers and organizations can better protect sensitive and confidential data and ensure the safety and privacy of those they serve.

Dr. Dilli Prasad Sharma is a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto, Ontario (Canada). Prior to joining the University of Toronto, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity, University of New Brunswick, NB, Canada from 2021 to 2022. He received a Ph. D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Dr. Sharma has published many peer-reviewed technical papers in leading journals and conferences in the areas of cybersecurity. His research interests include smart and safe city, security analytics, security modelling and analysis, malicious user behaviour detection, cryptography, moving target defence, security metrics and artificial intelligence applications in cybersecurity.

Dr. Arash Habibi Lashkari is a Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity and an Associate Professor at York University (Canada). He is the author of ten published books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles on various cybersecurity-related topics. He has over 25 years of teaching experience, spanning several international universities, and was responsible for designing the first cybersecurity Capture the Flag (CTF) competition for post-secondary students in Canada. He has received 15 awards at international computer security competitions – including three gold awards – and was recognized as one of Canada’s Top 150 Researchers for 2017. The first four books from his Understanding Cybersecurity Series (UCS) program for Law and Privacy, Data Sovereignty, Fintech, and DeFi were published by Springer. Building on over two decades of concurrent industrial and development experience in network, software, and computer security, his current work involves the development of vulnerability detection technology to protect network systems against cyberattacks. He simultaneously supervises multiple research and development teams working on several projects related to network traffic analysis, malware analysis, Honeynet, and threat hunting.

Mona Parizadeh is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine, (Canada). She specializes in computational biology, bioinformatics, microbial ecology, and community ecology. She has eight years of experience analyzing genomic data in both agricultural and human microbiomes. She holds a Ph.D. in Biology and a DESS (diplôme d’études supérieures spécialisées) in bioinformatics from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada. Her doctoral research focused on the drivers of microbiome diversity and composition in agroecosystems and their variation in response to perturbations, funded by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. She is interested in environmental effects on microbiomes, host-microbe and microbe-microbe interactions, and drivers of microbial community assembly in different environments, including humans, plants, and soil. She addresses these objectives by applying ecological theory and using different high-throughput sequencing approaches, including meta-barcoding and meta-omics.