Forescout Expands Healthcare Cybersecurity Focus With CyberMDX Deal

Computer hackers beware: Forescout Technologies Inc. has beefed up its medical device cybersecurity prowess.

The company has acquired healthcare cybersecurity provider CyberMDX, which specializes in visibility and threat prevention for medical devices and clinical networks. Forescout executives said the purchase further strengthens the company’s position as a provider of out-of-the-box support for connected device types across IT, IoT, OT and IoMT products.

Forescout recently announced that its platform discovered 66 percent more vulnerable devices than originally expected at the University Health Network (UHN), a group of four hospitals in Toronto, Canada, that includes The Toronto General Hospital, which Newsweek ranked last year as the fourth-best hospital in the world. UHN is leveraging the Forescout platform to “deal with the exponential increase in the number of IoT devices and ever-increasing volume of sophisticated threats, including ransomware,” according to Kashif Parvaiz, chief information security officer at UHN. With the addition of CyberMDX’s solution, Forescout customers will be able to gain deeper visibility and risk management of their IoMT and medical devices.
 
“Forescout is seeing rapid growth in healthcare, a market the company has always focused attention on from a technology and sales perspective,” said Wael Mohamed, CEO of Forescout. “Cybersecurity for IoMT, much like cybersecurity for OT devices, requires specific expertise and technologies. We are pleased to have the CyberMDX team join Forescout as we continue delivering new capabilities on our market-leading platform and grow our R&D center.”
 
CyberMDX has developed a solution for visibility and risk management of IoMT devices. Together, Forescout and CyberMDX have a powerful platform that delivers an easy-to-use, scalable and agentless approach to device visibility, classification, threat detection and incident response focused on IoMT devices to better serve healthcare organizations.
 
“CyberMDX enables hospitals to provide quality care by securing and protecting the systems and devices they rely on every day to treat patients and save lives,” said Amir Magner, president and co-founder of CyberMDX. “We are thrilled to join the Forescout team where our innovation can continue to make a profound difference to healthcare organizations around the world.”
 
Broad coverage across all device types is essential as larger organizations, such as healthcare, almost always have a wide variety of device types, including IT and a rapidly expanding number of IoT devices, in addition to IoMT and OT devices. CyberMDX was recognized as a Medical Device Security Solution Leader in The Forrester New Wave: Connected Medical Device Security, Q2 2020.
  
Over the past 20 years, Forescout has built unique strength in device intelligence and network fabric technology for device discovery and classification. The company’s Device Cloud database contains more than 15 million device fingerprints and ensures Forescout’s customers automatically receive highly specific, out-of-the-box device classification capabilities from the Forescout platform for millions of different types of devices.
 
Forescout Technologies actively defends the Enterprise of Things by identifying, segmenting and enforcing compliance of every connected thing. Fortune 1000 companies trust Forescout as it provides one of the most widely deployed, enterprise-class platforms at scale across IT, IoT, OT and IoMT managed and unmanaged devices. Forescout arms customers with extensive device intelligence, data and policies to allow organizations across every industry to accurately classify risk, detect anomalies and quickly remediate cyberthreats without disruption of critical business assets.