Israeli startup Medigate today announced $5.35 million in seed funding from YL Ventures, with additional funding from Blumberg Capital. The Tel Aviv-based company says it will use the investment to advance development of its dedicated medical device security platform.
Medigate says its solution is a dedicated platform for securing networked medical devices that are connected to electronic medical records, device servers, other enterprise systems and the internet. It is said to fuse the knowledge and understanding of medical workflow and device identity and protocols with the reality of today’s cybersecurity threats.
Medigate claims it can provide visibility into all the medical devices connected to the network, fully identify these devices by type and personality and analyze and understand their specialized protocols, communications and behaviors. By using this knowledge to detect anomalies and suspicious activities, Medigate says it protects connected medical devices from network attacks and data exfiltration attempts.
“Sophisticated cyberthreat actors are increasingly targeting the ubiquitous medical devices used by healthcare providers. Recent examples include attempts to extort money by paralyzing healthcare delivery, but soon, attackers may seek to directly harm patients. In parallel, the installed base of connected medical devices lacks effective defenses as they implement limited and hard-to-update security capabilities and have long service lives. Protecting these medical devices requires solutions that speak their proprietary or unique languages with native fluency and block attacks without disrupting critical care delivery,” Tom Baltis, CISO of Delta Dental Insurance, said in a press release.
According to Jonathan Langer, Medigate CEO and co-founder, “It’s an imperative to connect devices to the network, both to manage and monitor devices in real time and to understand and analyze the large amounts of data generated from these devices. At the same time, we see backdoor attacks like MEDJACK and ransomware attacks like WannaCry and NotPetya successfully targeting healthcare providers. Connected devices are a ripe target for cybercriminals. The Medigate solution is designed to effectively protect medical devices from these attacks and eliminate this pandemic risk.”
The Medigate Security Platform is currently in limited availability. General availability will be in mid-2018.