Your Pacemaker Can be Hacked

Those nefarious virus-making hacker folk have the potential to be even more dangerous.  WSJ explains:

Medical devices that control the human heart may need safeguards to protect against remote-control hacking that could deliver electrical shocks to patients, researchers said.

Millions of Americans have pacemakers, which keeps hearts beating regularly, or an implanted defibrillator, which can restart stopped hearts with an electric jolt. After implanting a defibrillator under a patient's skin, a doctor uses a special device, about the size of a breadbox, to tell the defibrillator what to do -- for example, to instruct it to keep the heart beating at a certain rate or deliver a test jolt.

The devices, called programmers, communicate with a defibrillator using radio waves. To prevent tampering, only physicians are allowed to buy one from the manufacturers -- Medtronic Inc., Boston Scientific Corp., and St. Jude Medical Inc.

But hackers could transmit the same radio signals -- causing a defibrillator to shock or shut down, or divulge a patient's medical information -- without needing a programmer, researchers found in a laboratory test of one model from Medtronic.