Tufts Medicine Secures 21k+ Connected IoMT and IoT Devices

Challenge

Tufts Medicine observed a dramatic increase in U.S. hospital cyberattacks. Each of their locations were at a different maturity level, and they lacked visibility into their connected devices and vulnerabilities. They formed a new security team and restructured security operations to a centralized Information Technology team with dedicated security specialists. Tufts needed a way to passively scan medical devices, prioritize vulnerabilities, and streamline mediation efforts with their outsourced Clinical Engineering teams.

Tufts Medicine evaluated four IoMT cybersecurity vendors for the ability to:

• improve asset visibility through accurate detection of connected medical and IoT devices and inventory management capabilities
• tailor workflow to their organizational processes
• prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities
• implement an effective incident response program
• evaluate the cyber risk of devices prior to purchase
• establish baseline metrics and performance KPIs including clear risk reduction metrics
• gauge their organizational risk and compare it to industry standards
• and be a strategic technology partner.

Solution

After a complete evaluation, Tufts Medicine selected Asimily because of its vulnerability management capabilities and viewed Asimily as a strategic technology partner. Asimily Insight was deployed with five Edge processors at each location and integrations with Rapid 7 InsightVM for a holistic view of vulnerabilities across their environment, Azure AD for single sign-on, and Azure Sentinel (SIEM) for a single pane of glass view of threats across their organization.

Key milestones included:

• connected medical devices were automatically detected and classified
• existing vulnerabilities were identified and correlated to all impacted devices via passive scanning
• prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities
• clinically-validate remediation instructions were automatically delivered and prioritized for clinical engineering teams
• and unauthorized devices were detected with automated workflows and alerts.

Tufts Medicine will continue to mature its security program by implementing:

• pre-procurement risk assessments using Asimily ProSecure
• a deeper Incident Response workflow with their 24/7 SOC team via SIEM integration
• and integrations with CrowdStrike for additional threat data from the devices, ServiceNow CM DB to enrich and reconcile device inventories, and Aruba ClearPass (NAC) to enable network enforcement and segmentation.