Hospital viruses: Fake cancerous nodes in CT scans, created by malware, trick radiologists

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/03/hospital-viruses-fake-cancerous-nodes-ct-scans-created-by-malware-trick-radiologists/

By Kim Zetter
The Washington Post
April 3, 2019

When Hillary Clinton stumbled and coughed through public appearances 
during her 2016 presidential run, she faced critics who said that she 
might not be well enough to perform the top job in the country. To quell 
rumors about her medical condition, her doctor revealed that a CT scan of 
her lungs showed that she just had pneumonia.

But what if the scan had shown faked cancerous nodules, placed there by 
malware exploiting vulnerabilities in widely used CT and MRI scanning 
equipment? Researchers in Israel say they have developed such malware to 
draw attention to serious security weaknesses in critical medical imaging 
equipment used for diagnosing conditions and the networks that transmit 
those images — vulnerabilities that could have potentially life-altering 
consequences if unaddressed.

The malware they created would let attackers automatically add realistic, 
malignant-seeming growths to CT or MRI scans before radiologists and 
doctors examine them. Or it could remove real cancerous nodules and 
lesions without detection, leading to misdiagnosis and possibly a failure 
to treat patients who need critical and timely care.

Yisroel Mirsky, Yuval Elovici and two others at the Ben-Gurion University 
Cyber Security Research Center in Israel who created the malware say that 
attackers could target a presidential candidate or other politicians to 
trick them into believing they have a serious illness and cause them to 
withdraw from a race to seek treatment.

[...]

--
Subscribe to InfoSec News
https://www.infosecnews.org/subscribe-to-infosec-news/
https://twitter.com/infosecnews_