However, these things are easily programmed via a special magnet, and a computer.

This is typically proprietary technology, and hospitals employ contractors FROM the pacemaker companies to run the equipment with a cardiologist who’s an expert with electrical therapies of the heart.

I dunno what sort of thing hackers can do remotely. I mean, you do checkups by phone, and if a hacker knew you were on the phone doing a checkup, they could MAYBE affect your pacemaker. But PERFECT TIMING is of the essence, and this is FAR from a mass-pacemaker disruption.

If you take a giant magnet that is going to read and write to the pacemaker of many people, it’s going to disrupt them all in the first place.

There’s not much to fear, this is good progress, though, and I don’t think pacemakers are going to be the target of any sick fucks.

You make very good points. You are right in saying that this hack is not immediately dangerous or anything to be worried about. I couldn’t see someone really getting away with this on a high profile person in it’s current state. But I think the story and the hack in general is more of a proof-of-concept to get people thinking about relying on electronic devices for their health. Who knows what kind of advancements in the medical technology may yield. It may soon be common to have multiple devices in your body monitoring your health and all of them with similar wireless access. It is then that these things should really be taken into consideration but we should at least begin to think about it now.

@richard,

Some government web crawler just put you on a terrorist watch list. You should spell it chaynee from now on.

you may be right about the range limitation, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t possible to build a very powerful focused transmitter that could open the distance to say 25 yards (remember those shopping cart wheel locker hacks a while back). It wouldn’t even have to be tiny, anything that could fit within one of those modern suitcases would probably be small enough.

Yes, it is security through obscurity but obscurity doesn’t cost power, take additional space or add complexity.

But the main reason you shouldn’t be concerned about it, to communicate with the device, or to activate the wireless, you typically have to be within a few inches of the device. The wireless communications are very power hungry so typically they are only turned on by circuits that are passively powered or via magnets.

So yes, if some strange guy is holding a weird device over your chest maybe you have something to be concerned about.

Overall this story is mainly FUD. Modern pacemakers are extremely well engineered and the amount of testing that goes into them is impressive. It is one of the industries where a minor bug could easily turn into multimillion dollar lawsuits.

Also it amazes me how many people on here are supporting security through obscurity.

These researchers could have probably sold this information to some black ops group or used it in a harmful way themselves. Now if someone actually uses this attack, God forbid the medical companies don’t make the changes to protect against it, we will have a much greater chance of identifying it as a homicide and not just another heart attack or failed ICD.

Also, you shouldn’t smoke marijuana and ride motorcycles.