Trend Micro Cybersecurity Company has started distributing 250 USB flash drives with an anti-virus scanning engine free of charge to French hospitals as part of a public awareness campaign. Computer security of biomedical environments explained to TICsanté Loïc Guézo, director of strategic development of the publisher for Southern Europe. As a specialist in IT security in the industrial sector, Trend Micro has been investing in the healthcare sector for several years, with particular emphasis on securing biomedical equipment. “By declination in the medical sector, biomedical equipment is the equivalent of industrial systems, and they leave almost all the time the perimeter of the DSI”, pointed Loïc Guézo, interviewed by TICsanté at Le Mans on the occasion of the 7th Annual Congress of the Association for the Safety of Health Information Systems in early April. “Hospitals are also a critical sector because they are increasingly connected, open to exchanges with other structures, and do not always have the skills to deal with incidents,” he said.

After formally launching a pole dedicated to health in January, Trend Micro launched an awareness campaign among institutions in the first half of the year as part of its CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) strategy. It consists of distributing 250 kits, including the Trend Micro USB Scan Tool, an identification code for a one-year free license, and a Health and Biomedical poster, sold at a cost of 1,000 euros, the Portable Security 2 stick connects to a USB port and allows you to perform virus scanning and remove malicious programs without connection to the internet and without installation of specific software. A light at the back of the key informs the user of the results of the scan: it takes the color red when a virus has been detected and action must be performed, green when a virus has been detected and deleted, and blue when no threat has been identified. The key also has a “logging capability” that provides the user with a list of completed scans and detected threats when used on multiple devices, highlighted Loïc Guézo.

“This puts in the hands of operators who are not security experts an easy-to-use tool for controlling an entire fleet of equipment, and then triggering security procedures,” she said. The company worked with the Ministry of Solidarity and Health to identify the most critical hospitals, and send them the awareness kit. “Then it is up to the institution to decide to use the key as a test on an environment identified by its care,” said Loïc Guézo. Trend Micro is working in parallel with the third version of the Portable Security key, which will be “more integrated with the rest of the IT security oversight infrastructure,” he added.

The company is present with its security software in at least one establishment of 50% of the regional hospital groups (GHT). Among them are the University Hospital of Nancy, the University Hospital of Rennes and Nantes, and the Hospital Center (CH) of Mâcon.