JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Many societal systems has since the beginning of 2020 been used to an extend not planned for - and as such with concern for collapse. Clearly the concern for collapse of the healthcare system - primarily the hospitals – has been a key concern and many initiatives, including lockdown and curfew, was taken to avoid such a collapse. The internet was the key platform to be used to enable people to work from home, providing remote teaching, making meetings online etc.

Objective:

However when it comes to data communication and processing, the risk of collapse is not the only risk – and maybe not even the biggest one. Many systems was properly taken into used in such a hurry, that it did not allow time (and concern) for a proper risk and privacy assessment.

Methods:

This paper presents some of the statistics regarding traffic grows and security attacks on the internet during 2020 and 2021 and is analyzing how this knowledge can be used in future design of internet based telemedical solutions.

Results:

The Internet did not collapse during the COVID pandemic - as many people predicted. However, the massive use of the internet, in new innovative ways, created a number of new opportunities for cyber security breach. Especially the use video conferences made made-in-middle attacks, phishing and other classical breach possible in a new way due to insufficient authentication and content encryption.

Conclusions:

The paper concludes that even though a large amount of experience has been gathered with respect to scaling eHealth systems a minimum amount of improvement with respect to privacy and security is identified.