In 2001, a doctor in New York completed what may seem like a routine surgery to remove a patient’s gallbladder. But in fact that procedure wasn’t routine at all, because the patient was in France. That was the first successful long-distance robotic surgery, or telesurgery, ever performed, and since then the field has taken off. Though robotic surgery is not yet the industry standard, sales of medical robots are increasing by 20 percent each year, and by 2025 the Department of Defense wants to have deployable Trauma Pods ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4wjAlprgBc ) that could allow surgeons to operate on soldiers from hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Though proponents of telesurgery have thoroughly discussed its benefits (there's no delay due to travel time, for example, and surgery could be possible in remote locations like deep underwater or in outer space) there hasn’t been much exploration of its weaknesses. Researchers from the University of Washington decided to put the telesurgery technology to the test to see if they are susceptible to cyber attacks. According their study, the security of surgical robots leaves much to be desired. ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04339 )
http://www.popsci.com/robots-used-surgery-can-be-easily-hacked
(Score: 5, Insightful) by lentilla on Wednesday April 29 2015, @09:17AM
I'd like to think that security and robot operations were separate systems. We don't expect a security expert to be any good at producing a medical robot - why should we expect the inverse? In practical terms: medical robots need to be on their own network - then it doesn't matter how "insecure" they are. It also prevents the inevitable exploits leading from flawed "reinventions" of the security wheel.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @11:23AM
Missed the part of the summary that says "thousands of miles away" did you? You're going to run a cable thousands of miles long, are you? On their own network, you say. You're a fucking moron.