In-brief: Cisco’s Marc Blackmer reports from the S4 Conference in Miami – one of the top gatherings of industrial control system security experts. Among the attractions this year: Justine Bone of the firm Medsec, the psychology of malicious insiders and a hackable “kegerator.”
In-brief: St. Jude Medical said on Monday that it patched a serious hole in a product used to program implantable medical devices like defibrillators. But researchers and a Wall Street investment firm say the company still has more holes to close.
In-brief: The FDA’s final guidance on cybersecurity for postmarket medical devicesmarks a departure from earlier drafts, focusing generically on cybersecurity risk management and jettisoning an early focus on the threat posed by “connected devices” that some considered too narrow.
Researchers from universities in Belgium and the UK have published research showing that a wide range of implantable medical devices, including implantable defibrillators are still vulnerable to wireless snooping and denial of service attacks. The research, which mimicked the work of a naive (or “weak”) adversary, found that few security protections have been added to such devices, years after researchers first demonstrated that they are vulnerable to wireless attacks and other manipulation. The discoveries apply to at least 10 types of implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs) that are currently on the market, though the devices and manufacturers are not named. The researchers, from Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven in Belgium (KU Leuven) and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom echoes the claims made by the firm MedSec earlier this year, which warned of security holes in ICD devices made by St. Jude in August. That research was the foundation of a call […]
Some of the nation’s top experts on cyber security and the Internet of Things urged Congress to take a more forceful approach to securing a burgeoning population of Internet connected devices before security and quality issues undermine consumer confidence. Members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce were told in separate testimony that security problems such as the recent denial of service attacks linked to the Mirai botnet will become more common and could threaten the integrity of the Internet and of the nation’s broader economy if left unaddressed. The Committee heard from Dr. Kevin Fu of the University of Michigan, Bruce Schneier of IBM and a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Dale Drew, the Chief Security Officer of Level3 Communications. All three, to varying degrees, advised a bigger government role in setting standards for devices connected to the Internet. And all three warned that a failure to […]
