Health Care Cybersecurity Beginning to Negatively Impact Patient Care
But a risk of health care cybersecurity began to grow harder to ignore roughly a decade ago when a string of researchers began to warn that a number of medical devices were vulnerable to cyber sabotage. In 2008, Kevin Fu, then an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, demonstrated that pacemakers and implantable cardiac defibrillators were vulnerable to software radio-based attacks. In 2011, white hat hackers Jay Radcliffe and Barnaby Jack demonstrated vulnerabilities in a popular insulin pump model. A year later, Jack showed the feasibility of a pacemaker attack made famous in the Showtime series “Homeland,” while many insulin pump wearers took to hacking insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors to enable new functionality.