Hackers Will Be Tempted by Cyborg Vulnerabilities | Big Think

A subset of the Internet of Things is a whole category of medical devices. We have wearables, things like the Fitbit. We have embeddables. We have implantables. Things like diabetic pumps, for example. Internet-enabled defibrillators implanted in our chests. So implantable defibrillators, pacemakers, and the like. We have brain-computer interfaces. And now we’re even creating pills that are Internet-enabled so that you can swallow a pill and it goes into your stomach. The pill’s computer is powered by your stomach acid, and it can control the release of medicine, how much medicine is released over time.

So we are slowly but surely becoming cyborgs. I know it sounds like science fiction, but if you think about it, most people are walking around with their cell phone in their pocket or in their hand 24/7. When people go to sleep, they put it on their nightstand. So slowly but surely, computers are replacing our own cognitive abilities to an extent. When I was younger, I used to know by memory the phone numbers of all of my friends because there were no cell phones with all these little address books. Today we just automatically dump that data into our cell phone and just call it up on demand. The same with our address books and the like.

So the cell phone, though currently outside of our body, means that's kind of the first step towards us theoretically becoming cyborgs. The next step, of course, will be implanting these devices into us. There are people, several researchers, including one out of Cambridge in the UK, that have implanted RFID chips underneath their skin for years. These people are called body modders, and they will go out there and use those RFID chips to open up the security door in their office place, to pay for goods and services. So you can actually do that now.

So there’s a whole movement of people who are quite interested. It’s sort of underground these days. It’s sort of the next generation of piercing. There’s a whole community around piercing and tattooing. And the next generation of that is to implant these computer devices in our skin, under our skin that give us new forms of senses. For example, magnets. A whole movement of people put magnets under their skin, and they have now created a sixth sense that the rest of us don’t have, which is that they can actually explore magnetism in our environment.

So for the more computers that we put in, there’s no special exemption for medical devices that makes them unhackable. In fact, medical devices are entirely hackable. Going back four or five years, the Medtronic pacemaker, the automatic defibrillator, was proven by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to be hackable, where remotely you could go ahead and deliver a shock to somebody's heart, to somebody’s perfectly functioning heart. A shock that would cause a well-functioning heart to go into cardiac arrest.

The Defcon and Black Hat conferences are hacker conferences in Las Vegas. We’ve had hackers on stage exploit these devices. One famously done with a Bluetooth, basically a Bluetooth extender that could allow somebody from a distance of a few hundred feet to find people who had diabetic pumps, right? These are pumps inside their bodies that feed insulin on a very controlled basis into the human body. And with this Bluetooth, you could take a few weeks of insulin and release it in an hour, causing somebody to go into a diabetic coma and, therefore, death.

So these tools are clearly going to save hundreds of thousands of lives. There are hundreds of thousands of implantable medical devices in human beings in the United States and around the world today. That number is going to grow exponentially as they become more powerful. Brain-computer interface computers, such as cochlear implants, are growing. In the old days, if you were hearing impaired, they would kind of create a hearing aid that you’d wear inside your ear. Now they can actually attach a device directly to your skull and wire into your auditory nerve directly into your brain.

So there is an interface between a computer on your body and...