Can Pacemakers Be Hacked?

Emmy winning drama ‘Homeland’ used this as a plot line, showing *SPOILER terrorists hacking in to the vice president’s pacemaker (or more realistically a implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD), Credit). in order to assassinate him. While many scoffed this off as science fiction, the technique was proven successful – though not by terrorists – in 2008.

The world of hacking sounds like something out of a C. S. Lewis novel. There are the “white hats”, or the good guys, who try and find the hacks in the software before the dreaded “black hats”, or bad guys, get their mischievous hands on them.

The late Barnaby Jack was a respected white hat, working for IOActive, a computer security service. Jack was 35 years-old, was living in San Francisco and was working on a presentation that exposed an unnamed manufacturer’s flaw. The flaw shows that pacemakers and ICD’s could be controlled wirelessly.

Jack died July 25th in his apartment just days before this presentation.