Undetectable Data Breach in IoT: Healthcare Data at Risk

Abstract

The introduction of Internet of Things (IoT has revolutionized the healthcare sector through the digitalization with an enormous amount of patient data that is collected, processed, stored and shared amongst different healthcare stakeholders. The IoT has improved the healthcare service delivery, thus allowing remote patient monitoring, early diagnosis, reduction of medical errors and effective decision making through the data generated by these IoT devices on a real-time basis. Although the IoT has shown a positive transformation in the healthcare sector, a number of challenges are presented, given that the health data is sensitive and its privacy should be preserved. The healthcare sector has become a target of attacks because of the amount of sensitive and personal data that is being collected and shared by these IoT devices. As a result, the healthcare sector has been experiencing major data breaches. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the root cause of data breaches in the healthcare sector. Secondly, investigate the limitations of the IoT devices in detecting data breaches. Thirdly, investigate the limitation of the security and privacy methods that are used in the healthcare sector to secure the healthcare data and preserve its privacy. Lastly, investigate security measure that can be put in place for data breach detection in the healthcare sector. The final outcome of this paper will be to make security and privacy recommendations that can be used to mitigate or reduce the frequency of data breaches in the healthcare sector.