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Concern raised as US researchers hack into pacemakers


PM - Friday, 14 March , 2008  18:40:00

Reporter: Ashley Hall

LISA MILLAR: Doomsayers often forecast that the machines that help us may eventually be our undoing.

Few medical devices have been as successful as pacemakers which help maintain a regular heartbeat for patients with cardiac problems. But US researchers have found a way to hack in and take control of the life-saving devices in much the same way that computer hackers invade hi-tech systems.

They say people with a pacemaker shouldn't worry but the research raises security questions for the most famous owner of one - the US Vice President Dick Cheney.

Ashley Hall reports.

ASHLEY HALL: Implantable cardiac defibrillators, or ICDs, can deliver a shock to a heart that's beating out of rhythm, and with a pacemaker included, they can keep that heart beating properly.

PATIENT: The problem was that I'd had an incident during a minor surgical thing and my heart rate had dropped, so they decided, because I was then facing a major operation, that I should have the pacemaker to make sure my heart did not slow down too much.

ASHLEY HALL: This patient who doesn't want to be named, had an ICD installed a few weeks ago. It's been working well and he says getting data from the device is a simple procedure.

PATIENT: The technician sort of fits you with a, comes next to you with a wand, a big grey plastic wand, and just waves it over and from that gets all the information like a blue tooth connection, and then gives you a printout. And she could tell me everything I'd been up to in the previous week.

I'd had one instance when it was, it was up quite late one evening and they were worried, wondering what I'd been up to but it turned out it was the last day of Australia v India in Brisbane and that was okay.

ASHLEY HALL: (Laughs) But they got your heart pounding.

PATIENT: That got my heart racing.

ASHLEY HALL: But he's concerned to learn that a team of computer experts, electrical engineers and cardiologists have been able to hack into a similar device, taking data off its computer chip, running down the battery and even activating its shocking mechanism.

Yoshi Kohno is a computer security and privacy specialist from the University of Washington.

YOSHI KOHNO: My study of this actually began in 2005 when I was at a computer security conference and I went out to dinner and the person sitting next to me had his own implantable medical device. His was to treat diabetes.

But we started talking about the technology going into that device and the way technology was heading in the future - how medical devices like his and others are becoming more wireless with greater computational capabilities.

And as a security researcher one of the things we need to do is to look 10, 15 years into the future and see where is technology heading and what do we need to know now in order to make sure those new technologies don't introduce new security and privacy risks.

ASHLEY HALL: The team worked out how the ICD communicated and hacked into the device using some inexpensive gadgets available at an electronics shop.

YOSHI KOHNO: We did find that someone, potentially a bad person, could use their own equipment to interact with this device and potentially compromise the patient's privacy or modify the therapeutic settings or introduce electric shocks.

ASHLEY HALL: The use of wireless technology in implantable medical devices is still in its infancy, but the Sydney-based cardiothoracic surgeon Dr Nick Hendel says it's already paying dividends.

NICK HENDEL: It means that you don't have to place anything over the device in order to see what's been happening with it or to reprogram it. You can do it from, you know, sitting in the room. And I suppose that eventually they're hoping they'll be able to do it over the telephone or something like that. But the prime thing is that it doesn't require the technician to be close to the patient or to have any contact with the patient.

ASHLEY HALL: The US Vice President Dick Cheney had a pacemaker installed in 2001. It's not clear whether his device uses wireless technology to communicate information to doctors. But if it did, could someone with evil intent hack into the Vice President's device and shock or even kill him?

The researcher Yoshi Kohno says that's unlikely.

YOSHI KOHNO: In order to emulate the attacks that we researched in our paper, the bad person would have to put the equipment extremely close to the target implantable device; it would have to be fairly technically sophisticated, in fact an expert in the area; and of course have malicious intent as well. So the risk of this actually happening is probably fairly low.

ASHLEY HALL: Yoshi Kohno says the research will be used to make sure any security loopholes will be closed when future implantable devices are designed.

But despite assurances about the very low risk of an implanted cardiac defibrillator being hacked, the cardiac patient I spoke with remains concerned.

PATIENT: It's very alarming to hear that somebody could put something together and just for a bit of fun, have you running around the block when you're not.

LISA MILLAR: And that's a cardiac patient there speaking with Ashley Hall.