Kevin Fu, a cybersecurity professor, criticizes device makers for routinely adding wireless capabilities to IoT and medical hardware to boost marketing rather than enhance safety.
“But the interesting thing about wireless is that, you know, it was used for a specific reason, to address the clinical risk, but now I often see it used sort of willy-nilly on devices, more for the marketing side, less for actually addressing a safety risk, but my mom's from the Midwest, and she always used to put bacon on everything because she said it made everything taste better, and I think wireless is sometimes treated that way.”
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More from Kevin Fu
AssertionSupported
Fu: Wireless signals could trigger fatal heart rhythms in cardiac defibrillators
“We discovered we could actually generate our own wireless signals that would trigger this, what is effectively a debugging command to wirelessly induce fatal heart rhythms.”
Fu: Hospital medical device malware is mostly decade-old, automated malware
“There's, it's nothing too sophisticated. We're not talking about nation state adversaries or even the kid in the basement trying to hack into things. This is garden variety malware automated, sometimes 10 or 15 years old getting in.”
Fu: Pacemakers can be tricked into shutting down via RF interference
“A fun little trick you can do is if you send a particular pulse at a rate that looks like a normal cardiac rhythm in this case one hertz, so 60 beats per minute we've been able to trick pacemakers into effectively turning off because they say, oh, the heart is…”
Fu: Acoustic tones at 8 kHz can disable drones mid-flight
“He discovered if you send acoustic tones to a particular drone, you can cause the drone to fall out of the sky, because the MEMS accelerometer on the inside of the chip has a resonant frequency, and if you hit it at eight kilohertz, It just tricks that little …”
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