Former top gymnast champions fight against cyber warfare

by Martin Banks

 

The huge use of the internet in daily life has rasied concerns about data protection. The healthcare community is among those that needs to strengthen their barriers against cyber attacks in order to safeguard patients' data. But to do so they need to upgrade their protective technologies.

Last summer a major breach of the World Anti-Doping Agency's database by international hackers resulted in a massive release of athletes' private and confidential information, undermining the credibility of the International Olympic Committee and causing irreparable damage to the Olympic community.

The incident shows how healthcare and patient records are now at risk from sophisticated cyber attacks and a prime target for hackers.

An innovative option to tackle this could be the "blockchain system", a distributed database that guarantees the 100 per cent protection of store data against any attempt to tamper with or revise it.

It has been created as the underlying technology for the "Bitcoin" currency and has been successfully applied to other crypto-currencies. Having developed 33 different sports mobile applications, Alexander Chernozubov  is currently investigating how the blockchain would revolutionise athletes' data protection in sports.

Chernozubov, the president of the National Foundation for Mass Sports Development and a Russian national champion in gymnastics, is a strong believer in the power of social sports and the role of the new media and the Internet in popularizing sports. He envisions making the competitive processes in sports, both at the amateur and professional levels, more enriched by the new technology.

Whether blockchain is the winner is still to be determined but it has been identified as pivotal in health innovation for several reasons.

The first benefit is flexibility because it can be used to record information into a large scale network with a shared traceability.

The system, first conceived in 2008 and integrated for the first time in 2009, also guarantees full interoperability within the healthcare structure.

Chernozubov told this website, "The blockchain could also have useful applications in the sports ecosystem. If we look at the WADA scandal, in which athletes' EMRs were disclosed, there are similarities with the healthcare hierarchy. The IOC collects all athletes' data from the national anti-doping agencies and the International Sports Federations in a system which revolves around the Anti-Doping Agency Management System (ADAMS). This was the database subject to a cyber attack."

He adds, "The issue is of importance because Olympic athletes were shocked by the disclosure of their private data, which cast a shadow on their performances and results. But if hacking on healthcare was operated on a wider scale, the consequences would be even more serious and could spread to all layers of society.The healthcare sector must take action to prevent this catastrophic scenario."

The devotion of researchers such as Chernozubov, the proliferation of health start-ups actively researching applications for the blockchain give cause for hope for the useful deployment of thesystem in safeguarding our healthcare data.