FDA Releases Safety Notice About Some GE Healthcare Servers

By Allison Prang

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday said select GE Healthcare servers used for monitoring patients statuses or displaying their information were found to have "cybersecurity vulnerabilities."

The regulator's advisory was regarding select GE Healthcare Clinical Information Central Stations and Telemetry Servers. The FDA said it is possible someone could "remotely take control of the device to silence alarms, generate false alarms or interfere with the function of patient monitors connected to these devices" and that an attack on the servers could go unnoticed and not be found by security measures because it could seem to be a normal communication.

The FDA said it hasn't gotten any reports related to these issues.

A GE Healthcare spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company is "not aware of any incidents where these vulnerabilities have been exploited in a clinical situation."

"We are instructing the facilities where these devices are located to follow network management best practices and are developing a software patch with additional security enhancements," the spokesperson said.

Write to Allison Prang at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 23, 2020 15:24 ET (20:24 GMT)

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