In 2008 a group of hackers highlighted how someone could use an antenna, radio hardware and a PC to deliver a lethal shock to an implantable cardiac defibrillator (ICD).

In Hollywood there is a movie about the assassination of a political target. The hacker cum assassin exploited wireless vulnerabilities in pacemakers and insulin pumps to stop them from working leading the victim to die.

Radcliffe said to the press “My initial reaction was that this was really cool from a technical perspective. The second reaction was one of maybe sheer terror, to know that there’s no security around the devices which are a very active part of keeping me alive.”

In order to hack medical devices, an attacker could intercept wireless signals and then broadcast a stronger signal to change the blood-sugar level readout on an insulin pump so that the person wearing the pump would adjust their insulin dosage. If done repeatedly, it could kill a person. Radcliffe also suggests scenarios where an attacker could be within a couple hundred feet of a victim, like being on the same airplane or on the same hospital floor, and then launch a wireless attack against the medical device. He added that with a powerful enough antenna, the malicious party could launch an attack from up to a half mile away.

Security Researchers all around the world are taking this seriously are worried of these potentially fatal hacking attacks.  They are working on some security measures like password protection for such medical devices.

It is not just the medical field which is feeling the heat. Computer viruses are also responsible for many indirect deaths.

In 2008, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported that computer viruses may have contributed to the Spanair plane crash which killed 154 people in Madrid two years ago. The 12,000 page accident summary report explains that the Spanair central computer was trojan-infected and therefore failed to trigger an alarm which would have grounded the plane. After this accident, FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) showed its inability to effectively monitor air traffic control from such cyber-attacks.