Hacking In The Medical Field

Hospitals are entrusted with someone’s most important information including social security numbers and our medical information on the premise that they are secure, but as the technology evolves so does the risk from hackers gaining access to that information. With the increasingly technological society the world is becoming, how dangerous is hacking becoming? Medical records are often either held for ransom with ransomware or even just taken from hospitals without the hospital knowing. These medical records include information such as Social Security numbers and credit card information. Hackers have even found ways to hacking into medical devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps. Ultimately, due to a reliance on wireless technology, the
Gillian Mohney, a reporter for ABC News, explains how in 2013 over 300 devices made by 40 different companies are potentially vulnerable to hacking, including ventilators and drug infusion pumps. Although these issues were eventually fixed, “A larger concern, Lewis said, is that there is a chance a hacker attempting to get patient data could accidentally knock out medical devices connected to the Wi-Fi network, such as an MRI or X-ray machine” (Mohney). These incidents are not limited to outside interference in hospital’s cyber security as Harold Thimbleby claims. Harold Thimbleby, professor of computer science at Swansea University, clarifies in his report on a criminal case in the United Kingdom. Tech co., a company that produces blood glucometers to be used in hospitals, was found to have “tidied up” the database but provided no record of what they had done, this caused discrepancies. The hospital in order to prevent discrepancies over recorded data should have taken control over the records and improved cybersecurity in order to prevent tampering with the data. With Hospital equipment being ill-fit to run in our increasingly wireless world a more important problem arises, what about the portable medical
Jeremy Kirk, reporter for the IDG (International Data Group), describes an event where Barnaby Jack, a well-known white hat hacker (someone who hacks to ensure the security of an organization or device), presents one of those security risks by hacking a pacemaker and making it send an 830 shock from a laptop. This problem was caused by the change to a wireless society as with previous pacemakers, in order to change settings on the pacemakers a wand needed to be close to the pacemaker, but now that wireless technology is everywhere medical devices evolved with the rest of technology. However, this was only one event that a pacemaker was hacked, so even though he hacked the pacemaker, it could have been tampered with to allow this hack. Similarly, in another white hat hack, Jerome Radcliffe, Mocana’s smart device threat center director, hacks his own insulin pump in order to inform companies that are attempting to produce an artificial pancreas that they need to fix their security problems to keep the consumers safe. He hacks the insulin pump and changes its settings from a separate microprocessor chip which could prove to be dangerous. Although there are flaws in his hacking, most notably his prior knowledge of the device's identification number, something most hackers cannot discover without directly accessing