From: Fusion
Eighteen USB sticks were taken into a hospital. They were dropped on multiple floors of the building, left in places where they were likely to be found by hospital staff. Within 24 hours, at least one of them had been plugged into a nurse’s station, infecting it with malware. Hackers were soon able to get into the hospital’s network and take over medicine-dispensing devices. If they’d wanted, they could have caused hundreds of people to overdose. Death was a literal keystroke away.
But those fatal commands were never entered. The attack was orchestrated by benevolent white hat hackers as part of a multi-year, multi-institution study into the vulnerabilities of hospitals and their devices. The study, released by Independent Security Evaluators in February, showed just how easy it would be for a motivated hacker to get into a hospital’s computer system and cause potentially deadly damage.
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