Product security & hearing devices
We know you trust our hearing aids with something deeply personal—your hearing, your health data, and your everyday connection to the world. That trust matters. It’s why WSA is committed to maintaining strong security across all our products and solutions, ensuring you can rely on world‑class performance without compromising your privacy or safety. We design our technology to protect not just your devices, but your confidence in using them. Every update, every device, every day, we work to earn and keep your trust.
Our commitment to security
We embed security from the very first stages of product design. By applying a “shift‑left” development methodology, our teams integrate threat modeling, secure coding practices, and continuous risk assessment early in the engineering and development lifecycle—long before a device ever reaches testing or regulatory review. This proactive approach ensures that security isn’t an afterthought but a core design principle, helping us build medical technologies that are resilient, trustworthy, and ready to protect both clinical environments and the patients who rely on them. We are dedicated to protecting the integrity, privacy, and reliability of every product we deliver. Our approach is grounded in three core principles:
Security by design
We build security into our products from the very beginning—starting at early design and continuing through development, release, and end of life. Protection isn’t an add‑on; it’s a foundational part of how we engineer every device and solution.
Continuous improvement
The threat landscape evolves, and so do we. We monitor emerging risks, update our products when needed, and continually refine our processes to strengthen security over time. Our goal is to stay ahead of threats, not react to them.
Transparency
Your trust matters. That’s why we pair strong protection with clear, open communication. We use industry‑leading security practices to safeguard your devices and keep you informed about what’s happening, why it matters, and how you can stay protected.
Healthcare and the evolving Threat Landscape
The cybersecurity threat landscape in healthcare is evolving rapidly as the industry becomes more digitally connected. Hospitals, clinics, and medical device ecosystems are increasingly targeted by attackers who see healthcare data and critical clinical operations as high‑value opportunities. Threats have expanded beyond traditional data breaches to include system‑disrupting attacks, unauthorized access through third‑party partners, and attempts to compromise connected medical technologies. At the same time, the growing use of cloud services, mobile health tools, and AI‑driven workflows introduces new points of exposure. Together, these trends create a dynamic environment where cyber risks can directly impact patient care, making strong, proactive security practices essential for every organization involved in delivering healthcare.
Specific security practices are in place to help prepare and protect our products against present and future threats. These practices include:
Threat Modeling
We proactively identify potential security risks early in the design phase and plan effective mitigations before development begins. This helps us reduce vulnerabilities long before they can impact users.
Secure Coding Practices
Our engineers follow established secure‑coding standards, conduct peer code reviews, and use automated analysis tools throughout the development lifecycle. This disciplined approach ensures that security is consistently applied at every stage of coding.
Comprehensive Security Testing
We validate the security of our products through multiple layers of testing, which can include:
- Static and Dynamic Application Security Testing (SAST/DAST) are core components of our secure‑by‑design approach. Through SAST, we analyze source code early in development to identify vulnerabilities before the software ever runs. With DAST, we evaluate applications in a running state to uncover issues that only appear during real‑world operation. Together, these complementary methods help us detect and remediate security weaknesses throughout the development lifecycle, strengthening the resilience of our products long before they reach customers.
- Software composition analysis (SCA) allows us to understand and manage the open‑source components that make up our software. By continuously scanning for known vulnerabilities, outdated libraries, and licensing risks, SCA gives us visibility into the full software supply chain. This helps ensure that every third‑party component we use meets our security and compliance standards, strengthening the overall integrity of our products from the inside out.
- Penetration testing provides an independent, real‑world assessment of our products’ security by simulating the techniques used by malicious attackers. Skilled security professionals attempt to identify and exploit potential weaknesses across our applications, devices, and supporting infrastructure. The insights gained from these controlled tests help us validate our defenses, uncover hidden vulnerabilities, and strengthen our products before they reach customers—reinforcing our commitment to delivering secure, resilient medical technologies.
Change and Release Management
Before products are updated or released, they undergo a formal security review. This ensures that changes are evaluated, tested, and approved with security as a core requirement—not an optional step.
WSA participation in Healthcare Industry Groups
WSA actively contributes to strengthening medical device security by participating in leading healthcare‑sector industry groups that shape best practices, standards, and collaborative defense efforts. These groups bring together manufacturers, healthcare providers, government agencies, and security experts to improve the security and resilience of the healthcare. These industry groups include, but are not limited to:
The European Hearing Instrument Manufacturers Association (EHIMA) represents the major European hearing instrument manufacturers, offering smart hearing aid and implant solutions for people who are hard of hearing.
EHIMA was founded in 1985 and its members are among the world’s largest and most advanced hearing instrument manufacturers, producing up to 90% of the hearing instruments manufactured in Europe.
Members of EHIMA develop, manufacture and market hearing instruments on a large scale in one or more countries in Europe as well as exporting their products worldwide.
Health-ISAC (Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center) plays an essential role providing situational awareness around cyber and physical security threats to the Health Sector so that companies can detect, mitigate, and respond to ensure operational resilience.
The non-profit, private sector organization connects thousands of health security professionals globally to share peer insights, real-time alerts, and best practices in a trusted, collaborative environment.
The Healthcare and Public Health Sector Coordinating Council (HSCC) is a coalition of industry associations and their members. It has been a platform for collaboration among healthcare industry leaders and the government for more than a decade to address the most pressing security and resiliency challenges to the healthcare sector. Specifically, your organization is part of an interdependent ecosystem that is facing increasingly sophisticated operational and cybersecurity threats, and vulnerabilities that can cascade across the value chain of the healthcare sector, ultimately affecting patient safety, security and privacy. It is our collective responsibility to deliver industry-wide policy and operational solutions to this shared challenge. Many organizations are stepping up to this responsibility by joining the HSCC and its Cybersecurity Working Group (CWG). When combined with government partners, we are the Joint Cybersecurity Working Group. All healthcare sector stakeholders who have expertise and resources to contribute are encouraged to do the same.
How you can help stay secure
- Keep software up to date:
Install updates for your hearing aids, apps, and connected devices when they become available.
- Use trusted sources:
Download our apps only from official sources and follow instructions from your hearing care professional.
- Protect your phone and accounts:
Use strong passwords, enable screen locks, and turn on multi‑factor authentication where available.
Read more about our Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) on this page.