Hacked terminals capable of causing pacemaker deaths

Found on SC Magazine on Wednesday, 17 October 2012
Browse Technology

IOActive researcher Barnaby Jack has reverse-engineered a pacemaker transmitter to make it possible to deliver deadly electric shocks to pacemakers within 30 feet and rewrite their firmware.

In reverse-engineering the terminals – which communicate with the pacemakers – he discovered no obfuscation efforts and even found usernames and passwords for what appeared to be the manufacturer’s development server.

Sometimes I wonder if the companies behind such devices know nothing about security at all or simply decided not to care about it.