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Reliable reports on attacks on medical software and IT-systems available?


From: halfdog <me () halfdog net>
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:43:21 +0000

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I am searching for reliable reports on attacks on medical software and
infrastructure ___aiming to harm or kill patients___. There are quite a few
reports on data theft combined with blackmailing or data disclosure but rather
no information if there were already attacks that tried to or have really harmed
patients. Cases of interest are (just examples):

* Data manipulation: Change of medication, changing of radiotherapy data to
administer lethal doses, swapping of patient records to perform unnecessary
operations
* IT-System DOS: Patients harmed because therapy could not be determined or
administered due to system downtime/data loss, harm because best therapy could
not be used, inferior one caused harm
* Medical device manipulation: Diabetes pen firmware manipulation at vendor site
to report wrong values/use wrong dosage, manipulation of laboratory analytic
devices to mislead medical personal

It is not necessary that the attack was caused primary by a software flaw, that
was exploited. It would be sufficient, that e.g. weak passwords were guessed,
fired or unhappy personal used their account data or hospital visitors watched
personal using equipment and then used it themselves afterwards. Key factor is,
that the action to cause harm was performed with intent.

Reliable sources for reports on such attacks would be:
* Articles in medium to high quality media (newspaper, online magazines, ..)
* References to court cases
* Warning messages from national bodies (e.g. FDA and alike) to mitigate the
effects or requesting people to participate in clarification of facts
* Scientific papers analyzing the attack (similar to papers on the software
failure in the Therac system)
* Word from (named) persons, that were engaged in fighting such attacks,
(computer) forensics afterwards, crime investigation or court operation

Example for report: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/03/epilepsy
It is suspected, that this might have been the first targeted attack to harm
patients (In a forum a poster claimed, that this was no attack on the patients
but just blinking advertisements embedded via XSS hole).

- --
http://www.halfdog.net/
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