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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: 3, Informative) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday April 24 2018, @04:33PM (3 children)
He had a Pacemaker put in. For his heart. But he told the doctors, turn off the remote control. And they turned that off when they put in his Pacemaker. So the assassins couldn't EXPLODE HIS HEART!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @04:38PM (2 children)
You troll a lot, but they actually did disable the wireless features in Cheney's pacer for security reasons. Not exploding (lol) but when you have a device set to deliver electrical impulses to your heart, screwing up the timing, frequency, or amplitude of those can cause death. If you're dependent on it, then just disabling it will do the same.
They also did it without general anesthesia.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:19PM (1 child)
Why would they need any anesthesia to reset pacemaker controls? It's normally done with a magnetic loop...which needs to be within inches of the device, and properly positioned, to work. I trust the story didn't mean they turned THAT off, though I've never been sure what kind of wireless device his pacemaker had, or why it had it. If they're talking about the mag. loop controls...he was just being paranoid. You can't use that without direct contact and a bit of time to work. And turning off those controls would make it more likely that you *would* need an operation under general.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 24 2018, @10:57PM
The point is: they disabled wireless by putting in a new pacemaker. It's not like the standard software had a "send me this code and I will never listen to another wireless message again, I promise" code built into it, and it would have been much easier to trust if they just removed the receiver coil anyway.
I believe the no general anesthesia thing if they're just replacing the pulse generator, I'm not so sure I'd buy it for placing the lead on the heart.
Some people remove their own pacemaker (pulse generators) with pocket knives and no anesthesia, or more often just a shot of whiskey or three. It's not common, but with millions of implantees, there's enough crazy in the world that it happens every so often.
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