Pacemaker hacker says worm could possibly ‘commit mass murder’
There’s a conundrum of security vs access for medical devices that use WiFi access — you don’t want doctors being shut out because they don’t have the password, but no safeguards means that anyone can hack in and disrupt the hardware.
Besides reverse engineering a pacemaker to deliver a deadly shock from 30 – 50 feet away, he demonstrated how he could rewrite the devices’ onboard firmware. Jack also said it possible to upload malicious firmware to servers that would be capable of infecting pacemakers and ICDs. “We are potentially looking at a worm with the ability to commit mass murder,” Jack said. “It’s kind of scary.”
Can’t wait to see this as a TV plot, though.
It pretty much already is: http://www.hplusdigitalseries.com
Instead of common, ever-present things like pacemakers, it’s “nanobots” but the end result is the same, people just randomly collapse when they connect to wireless networks, the H inside their brain going into an software update that forces it to shut down.