Hackable implanted medical devices could cause deaths, researchers say

Medtronic, a manufacturer of pacemakers and implantable insulin pumps, won't fix security vulnerabilities in its products

A range of implanted medical devices with nine newly discovered security vulnerabilities won't be fixed by the manufacturer, despite the possibility that, if abused, the weaknesses could lead to injury or death.

In new research presented at the Black Hat information security conference, a pair of security researchers remotely disabled an implantable insulin pump, preventing it from delivering the lifesaving medication, and then took total control of a pacemaker system, allowing them to deliver malware directly to the computers implanted in a patient's body.