Assecure project

The ASSECURE (A Sustainable framework for cyber SECURity in E-healthcare) project is a research project funded by the Università Politecnica delle Marche (Univpm), addressing cyber security of healthcare institutions.

The project involves three faculties: Medicine, Engineering, Economics.

Motivation: The whole economy and social services of a developed country are nowadays mostly based on infrastructures and services delivered through the cyberspace. However, cyberspace and its components are affected by a certain number of potential threats, as the possibility of sudden and catastrophic events, or possible attacks from hackers. This is particularly true for the healthcare sector: on one hand, many medical devices contain configurable embedded computer systems, with their own hardware and software vulnerabilities; on the other hand, healthcare records represent an extremely attractive target for cyber criminals, containing several bits of sensitive information all in one place.

Objective: The main objective of this project is to measure the possibility, for an healthcare organization, to implement a framework for cyber security at minimum costs. This will be done by means of a suitable economics and financial analysis to estimate the costs of implementing the framework, by respecting various clinical, managerial, and technological priorities related with the organization’s expectations in cyber resilience. A key point will regard evaluation of the sustainability of the passage from the initial healthcare organization’s profile (i.e., the present status of the organization from the cyber security viewpoint) and the target profile’s expected (i.e., the status the organization aims to reach).

Impact: The project shall contribute to improve the resilience of hospital and medical centers to cyber attacks providing a sustainable value, through the achievement of potential significant benefits in terms both of direct costs (i.e., money saving) and indirect costs (i.e., customers’ trustfulness and reputation preservation).