It’s not every day that you can walk into a room and witness large groups of hackers, manufacturers, physicians, academics and regulators working together on some of the biggest cybersecurity challenges in today’s connected healthcare ecosystem.

Recently, that’s exactly what happened.

An Important Collaboration

Ensuring the continued security of connected medical devices is a top priority at Abbott, because connected devices help patients and their doctors make better, faster, and more informed medical decisions.

As part of our commitment to securing medical devices, we joined #WeHeartHackers, an initiative led by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to bring manufacturers and security researchers together at DEF CON 2019 to explore ways to improve the security of medical devices.

DEF CON is a leading cybersecurity conference held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. The conference includes many immersive “villages” that allow conference attendees to work with manufacturers to investigate and responsibly disclose product cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

Creating a Space where Everyone could Work Together

This year we partnered with Cal Poly’s California Cybersecurity Institute to design and build an immersive hospital set in the Biohacking Village to give security researchers the opportunity to defend a hospital and its connected medical devices from cyberattacks. Our immersive environment, featured in the Washington Post, included a pharmacy, laboratory, surgical room, radiology facility, and neonatal unit.