A team of academic security researchers from KU Leuwen, Belgium, have discovered that medical implants like electrical brain implants are quite insecure devices because these have defected [sic] wireless interfaces.
Researchers identified that the security factor of these devices is pretty weak; the defects in their wireless interfaces can allow attackers obtain sensitive neurological data, administer shocks and intercept confidential medical data, which gets transmitted between the implant and the connected devices that are responsible for controlling, updating and reading it.
[...] By hacking neurostimulators, an attacker can cause irreversible damage to the patients by preventing them from speaking or moving. The hacking may also prove to be life-threatening, wrote the Belgian researchers in their paper that provide details about the research findings.
Source: Hackread
The research paper in PDF form. [DOI: 10.1145/3176258.3176310]
From the abstract:
Implantable medical devices (IMDs) typically rely on proprietary protocols to wirelessly communicate with external device programmers. In this paper, we fully reverse engineer the proprietary protocol between a device programmer and a widely used commercial neurostimulator from one of the leading IMD manufacturers. For the reverse engineering, we follow a black-box approach and use inexpensive hardware equipment. We document the message format and the protocol state-machine, and show that the transmissions sent over the air are neither encrypted nor authenticated. Furthermore, we conduct several software radio-based attacks that could compromise the safety and privacy of patients, and investigate the feasibility of performing these attacks in real scenarios.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @04:04PM
The first thing I thought when I was this was holy shi—
What was I doing? Why is this comment box open? I'm certain there's nothing to worry about. Only a paranoid lunatic would think it could be used for mind contro— just a moment — just a moment — Oh! You also seem unaware of how important protecting our intellectual property is. Even now, Russian hackers could be giving the Chinese our most advanced summer romcom research. Protecting our romcoms is of utmost importance!