A Machine Learning Approach for the NLP-Based Analysis of Cyber Threats and Vulnerabilities of the Healthcare Ecosystem

Digitization in healthcare systems, with the wid adoption of Electronic Health Records, connected medical devices, software and systems providing efficient healthcare service delivery and management. On the other hand, the use of these systems has significantly increased cyber threats in the healthcare sector. Vulnerabilities in the existing and legacy systems are one of the key causes for the threats and related risks. Understanding and addressing the threats from the connected medical devices and other parts of the ICT health infrastructure are of paramount importance for ensuring security within the overall healthcare ecosystem. Threat and vulnerability analysis provides an effective way to lower the impact of risks relating to the existing vulnerabilities. However, this is a challenging task due to the availability of massive data which makes it difficult to identify potential patterns of security issues. This paper contributes towards an effective threats and vulnerabilities analysis by adopting Machine Learning models, such as the BERT neural language model and XGBoost, to extract updated information from the Natural Language documents largely available on the web, evaluating at the same time the level of the identified threats and vulnerabilities that can impact on the healthcare system, providing the required information for the most appropriate management of the risk. Experiments were performed based on CS news extracted from the Hacker News website and on Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) vulnerability reports. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which provides a realistic manner to assess the threats and vulnerabilities from Natural Language texts, allowing adopting it in real-world Healthcare ecosystems.