hacking a pacemaker

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Gadi Evron [ge () linuxbox org]
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 4:46 AM
To: David Farber
Subject: hacking a pacemaker

Almost a year ago I gave a talk at the CCC Camp in Germany I called "hacking
the bionic man". It even made Wired, in some fashion.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/will-the-bionic.html
http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/Fahrplan/events/2049.en.html

In the talk, among other things such as the DNA and scripting languages,
medical doctors and reverse engineers...  was about cybernetic hacking.
I gave some predictions, some for 2 years, others 40 years. Some again were
pure science fiction. I was wrong on the 2 years, it's here.

Today, this came up in the news (hat tip to Paul Ferguson on the funsec mailing
list):
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/business/12heart-web.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

" The threat seems largely theoretical. But a team of computer security
researchers plans to report Wednesday that it had been able to gain wireless
access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker.

They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity
that would potentially be fatal . if the device had been in a person. In this
case, the researcher were hacking into a device in a laboratory. "

        Gadi Evron.

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