New Frontiers in Hacking
Just when you though it was safe to have a device implanted in your body to deliver electric shocks to your heart, there’s this:
A Heart Device Is Found Vulnerable to Hacker Attacks [Barnaby J. Feder, NY Times]
It turns out that the risk of someone actually hacking a pacemaker is rather small, since the researchers were testing this on a device that wasn’t implanted, and they were within 2 inches of the device at the time.
These devices utilize a wireless radio to allow doctors access to monitor and reconfigure them without opening up the patient again. Normally this is done in the office, with a device placed near the implantation site, so it seems unlikely that someone is going to sit in a local coffee shop and give all the older patrons heart attacks.
In addition to the risk of someone “tweaking” a pacemaker’s settings, there is also the possibility that they would be able to obtain some private medical data from the device, which should raise some additional concerns about patient privacy.
There is some hope, however. The researchers suggested some enhancements to provide some defensive capabilities to these devices. These included notification of access attempts, authentication of connections, and key exchange. Obviously, since these devices have a limited power supply, they are focusing on ways to do this with little or no power coming from the device itself.
The full report can be downloaded here.
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