Currently, healthcare is critical environment in our society, which attracts attention to malicious activities and has caused an important number of damaging attacks. In parallel, the recent advancements in technologies, computing systems, and wireless communications are changing healthcare environment by adding different improvements and complexity to it. This article reviews the current state of the literature and provides a holistic view of cybersecurity in healthcare. With this purpose in mind, the article enumerates the main stakeholders and architecture implemented in the healthcare environment, as well as the main security issues (threats, attacks, etc.) produced in healthcare. In this context, this work maps the threats collected with a widely used knowledge-based framework, MITRE ATT&CK, building a contribution not seen so far. This article also enumerates the security mechanisms created to protect healthcare, identifying the principal research lines addressed in the literature, and listing the available public security-focused datasets used in machine-learning to provide security in the medical domain. To conclude, the research challenges that need to be addressed for future research works in this area are presented.

Small and medium enterprises are significantly hampered by cyber-threats as they have inherently limited skills and financial capacities to anticipate, prevent, and handle security incidents. The EU-funded PALANTIR project aims at facilitating the outsourcing of the security supervision to external providers to relieve SMEs/MEs from this burden. However, good practices for the operation of SME/ME assets involve avoiding their exposure to external parties, which requires a tightly defined and timely enforced security policy when resources span across the cloud continuum and need interactions. This paper proposes an innovative architecture extending Network Function Virtualisation to externalise and automate threat mitigation and remediation in cloud, edge, and on-premises environments. Our contributions include an ontology for the decision-making process, a Fault-and-Breach-Management-based remediation policy model, a framework conducting remediation actions, and a set of deployment models adapted to the constraints of cloud, edge, and on-premises environment(s). Finally, we also detail an implementation prototype of the framework serving as evaluation material.

The clinical environment is one of the most important sources of sensitive patient data in healthcare. These data have attracted cybercriminals who pursue the theft of this information for personal gain. Therefore, protecting these data is a critical issue. This paper focuses on an analysis of the clinical environment, presents its general ecosystem and stakeholders, and inspects the main protocols implemented between the clinical components from a security and privacy perspective. Additionally, this article defines a complete use case to describe the typical workflow within a clinical setting: the life cycle of a patient sample. Moreover, we present and categorize crucial clinical information and divide it into two sensitivity levels: High and Very Sensitive, while considering the severe risks of cybercriminal access. The threat model for the use case has also been identified, in conjunction with the use case’s security and privacy needs. This work served us as basis to develop the minimum security and privacy requirements to protect the use case. Accordingly, we have defined protection mechanisms for each sensitivity level with the enabling technologies needed to satisfy each requirement. Finally, the main challenges and future steps for the use case are presented.

In today’s dynamic and complex warfare landscape, characterized by the convergence of traditional and emerging threats, the significance of cybersecurity in shaping modern conflicts cannot be overstated. Such trend presents a challenging paradigm shift in how military organizations approach mosaic warfare in the digital age since new attack vectors and targets appear in their landscapes. In this vein, it is pivotal for military teams to have a clear and concise roadmap for cybersecurity incidents linked to potential mosaic warfare. This manuscript introduces a novel approach to bolstering mosaic warfare strategies by integrating an advanced Knowledge Representation and Reasoning system and a tailored ontology. Motivated by the critical role of cybersecurity in contemporary warfare, the proposed system aims to enhance situational awareness, decision-making capabilities, and operational effectiveness in the face of evolving cyber threats. In this sense, this manuscript entails a new ontology that not only covers the cybersecurity realm but also introduces key concepts related to strategic and operational military levels at the same time. The ad-hoc ontology is also compared against other well-known ones, such as MITRE, NATO, or UCO approaches and manifests a significant performance by employing standardized quality metrics for ontologies. Lastly, a realistic mosaic warfare scenario is contextualized to demonstrate the deployment of the proposed system and how it can properly represent all information gathered from heterogeneous data sources.