Eduard Marin and Dave Singelée, researchers with KU Leuven University, Belgium, began examining the pacemakers under black box testing conditions in which they had no prior knowledge or special access to the devices, and used commercial off-the-shelf equipment to break the proprietary communications protocols.
From the position of blind attackers the pair managed to hack pacemakers from up to five metres away gaining the ability to deliver fatal shocks and turn off life-saving treatment.
The wireless attacks could also breach patient privacy, reading device information disclosing location history, treatments, and current state of health.
[...] "Using this black-box approach we just listened to the wireless communication channel and reverse-engineered the proprietary communication protocol. And once we knew all the zeros and ones in the message and their meaning, we could impersonate genuine readers and perform replay attacks etcetera."
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:38PM
At first I thought maybe they interfered with the device sensing thus preventing stimulation, but they're just tampering with shit. And pacemakers are not intended to shock, that's an implanted cardioverter defibrillator (ICD). So either this is an oversight by the author and editor or the device manufacturer needs to engineer some safety in to their devices.