Researchers hack a pacemaker, kill a man(nequin)

It’s not every day that a person would come home from their university class and say, “Today I wirelessly hacked a pacemaker and killed the patient. Tomorrow I’ll hack an insulin pump and kill a patient.” Yet a few select souls from the University of South Alabama (USA) can shout that from a rooftop and still don’t need to worry about going to prison because the wireless medical devices were in iStan; it’s the “most advanced wireless patient simulator on the market.”

“The simulator had a pacemaker so we could speed the heart rate up, we could slow it down. If it had a defibrillator, which most do, we could have shocked it repeatedly. If it was the intent, we could definitely cause harm to the patient,” Mike Jacobs, professor and the director of the human simulation program at the university, told Motherboard. “It's not just a pacemaker, we could do it with an insulin pump, a number of things that would cause life-threatening injuries or death.”

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