Hello, welcome to the August Friday 10th, 2018 edition of the San San Antonio Storm Center's

Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich, and I'm recording from San Antonio, Texas.

Well, it's Blackhead and DefCon time again, and with that we got new exploits against

medical devices from Billy Rice and Jonathan Butts.

Their latest target is the Kerrink 2090 programmer. This is a device that doctors use in order

to program pacemakers. Now, the weakness they're exploiting here is an insecure update vulnerability. What this means

is that the update is downloaded via HTTP, not HTTP, and the download itself is also not

digitally signed, so it can easily be replaced with an arbitrary file.

The two researchers demonstrated that a malicious firmware can be uploaded and as a result, any pacemakers being programmed using the device that has this malicious firmware

loaded will then be able to deliver life-threatening shocks via the pacemaker.

So it is an exploit that will actually directly affect patient safety, and of course, the

firmware could be tailored to, for example, target-specific pacemakers, and it will also allow

for a wide range of possible attack scenarios here in how the pacemaker

is exactly set up to then endanger the patient. The other vulnerability that they're discussing

is sort of an old favorite and that's metronic insulin pumps. Now these insulin pumps are usually implanted into the patient, and they can be controlled

virulously.

In order to pull off this attack, they had to use a hack RF software-defined radio.

That's about a couple hundred dollar device, and it can be used to take control off the insulin pump and for

example set up the insulin pump to withhold the scheduled dose of insulin however a representative

of metronics states that typically this remote function is not enabled on these pumps, and also the particular pump that was tested

here is an older model. And researchers at IBM's X-Force have discovered a number of vulnerabilities in

systems commonly associated with smart cities.

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