Kevin Fu, an academic cybersecurity expert, explains the rare occurrence of defibrillators surviving longer than ten years due to historical polonium-based batteries.
“There are only a few people who have defibrillators more than 10 years old. That's because there used to be some polonium-based batteries, nuclear-powered batteries, and those typically outlast the patient.”
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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: Wireless connectivity is added to devices for marketing, not 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, bu…”
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