Hackers Will Be Tempted by Cyborg Vulnerabilities

Medical devices like pacemakers and insulin pumps will save many lives, but they also represent an opportunity to computer hackers who would use the Internet to cause havoc. Goodman's latest book is "Future Crimes: Inside the Digital Underground and the Battle for Our Connected World" (http://goo.gl/tw9EIi).

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Transcript - 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 interface. 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 a 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 book 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. If you – 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. Read Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/j7gdPU.