Medical device cybersecurity is the protection of connected clinical equipment against misuse, tampering, and software risk. It applies to devices such as infusion pumps, monitors, imaging systems, and implant programmers that rely on firmware, network connections, or vendor software to operate.
This matters because a vulnerable device can affect patient safety, clinical availability, and data integrity at the same time. Attackers may try to change device settings, disrupt care, steal credentials, or use the device as a foothold into a hospital network. Defenders focus on secure procurement, vendor support, patching, authentication, logging, network segmentation, and compensating controls when a device cannot support a needed feature. In practice, medical device cybersecurity is a lifecycle effort: security requirements should be checked before purchase, enforced during deployment, and revisited as software, threats, and clinical workflows change.