Drug Pumps Could Be Hacked to Kill Patients
Medical From: tom’s guide
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — Medical infusion pumps, which intravenously deliver drugs to millions of hospital patients in the United States every year, often have basic security flaws that could let hackers deliver fatal overdoses and which manufacturers may be unwilling to address, a security researcher said at the Summercon 2015 hacker conference here yesterday (July 18).
Billy Rios, a former U.S. Marine and Google and Microsoft security engineer who now runs his own firm in the Bay Area, singled out infusion pumps made by Lake Forest, Illinois-based Hospira as an example, although he implied other brands probably had similar issues. He added that Hospira’s pump-management software had a secret administrative account with a built-in, hard-coded password of “12345678”.
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