Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning , Governance & Risk Management , Healthcare

Healthcare Summit: Securing Life Sciences, Genomic Data

ISMG Summit Speaker Phil Englert of H-ISAC on Emerging Security Healthcare Issues
Phil Englert, director of medical device security, H-ISAC

Life sciences firms, including pharmaceutical companies, are facing growing challenges in securing complex sets of sensitive data such as genomic information, said H-ISAC's Phil Englert, one of many high-profile speakers who will discuss emerging industry trends at Information Security Media Group's upcoming Healthcare Summit 2023.

See Also: 2024 Report: Mapping Cyber Risks from the Outside

"The need to anonymize the data - human DNA - is very interesting in that it can be used to re-identify people, and by its very nature it has or can have electronic protected health information built right into it," said Englert, who is director of medical device security at the Healthcare Information Sharing and Analysis Center.

Englert will join speakers from CISA, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI, as well as chief information security officers in the healthcare field on Tuesday in New York City for the ISMG Healthcare Security Summit to discuss the state of security and hot topics such as artificial intelligence and third-party risk.

Englert makes the case that genomic data could hold great value to threat actors. "We can tell, from DNA, the gender of a person. Oftentimes, we can tell the heredity of a person. So, we can infer a lot of information without having a name or a Social Security number and an address or anything else," Englert said. "We're digitizing things that create concentrated risk."

In this video interview with Information Security Media Group, Englert also discussed:

  • Security risk challenges involving legacy devices, including OT equipment, used by healthcare and life sciences firms;
  • Threats to intellectual property in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries;
  • Critical themes emerging from two recent H-ISAC workshops concerning cyber challenges facing the life sciences sector.

Englert has over 30 years of technical and operational leadership experience in healthcare and life sciences. He was previously the chief product officer for MedSec, a cybersecurity consulting and services firm that focuses on hospitals and medical device manufacturers. Prior to that, he served as global leader for medical device cybersecurity at Deloitte, where he led client engagements developing medical device security programs.

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About the Author

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee

Executive Editor, HealthcareInfoSecurity, ISMG

McGee is executive editor of Information Security Media Group's HealthcareInfoSecurity.com media site. She has about 30 years of IT journalism experience, with a focus on healthcare information technology issues for more than 15 years. Before joining ISMG in 2012, she was a reporter at InformationWeek magazine and news site and played a lead role in the launch of InformationWeek's healthcare IT media site.




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