Ars Technica is reporting that 465,000 patients have been told to visit their doctor to patch a critical pacemaker vulnerability.
Cardiac pacemakers are small devices that are implanted in a patient's upper chest to correct abnormal or irregular heart rhythms. Pacemakers are generally outfitted with small radio-frequency equipment so the devices can be maintained remotely. That way, new surgeries aren't required after they're implanted. Like many wireless devices, pacemakers from Abbott Laboratories contain critical flaws that allow hijackers within radio range to seize control while the pacemakers are running.
"If there were a successful attack, an unauthorized individual (i.e., a nearby attacker) could gain access and issue commands to the implanted medical device through radio frequency (RF) transmission capability, and those unauthorized commands could modify device settings (e.g., stop pacing) or impact device functionality," Abbott representatives wrote in an open letter to doctors.
Also covered at Reuters.
The Abbot open letter also highlights that the upgrade process is not flawless:
Based on our previous firmware update experience, as with any software update, there is a very
low rate of malfunction resulting from the update. These risks (and their associated rates) include
but are not limited to:
* reloading of previous firmware version due to incomplete update (0.161%),
* loss of currently programmed device settings (0.023%),
* complete loss of device functionality (0.003%), and
* loss of diagnostic data (not reported).
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Thursday August 31 2017, @05:19PM (1 child)
Note to pedants: when I refer to basing things on parallel logic I understand that anything that has serial command input must store state. I just mean avoiding sequentially executed opcode programs.
(Score: 3, Funny) by frojack on Thursday August 31 2017, @07:28PM
Those aren't the source of the problem here.
The less you do in opcode the more you have to do in discrete electronic components or massively complex and expensive gate arrays.
You seem to be prefer an F35 in the chest rather than the paper airplane that does the job.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.