DEF CON 26 BIO HACKING VILLAGE - Vee - PWN to Own My Heart
The increase of pace in the technology field has left the race for manufacturers to increase the security in medical devices. There is the theoretically possibility that your heart can be pwned. Pacemakers have become part of the internet of things. We are putting our hearts on display. This is my journey from regular hacker to gen-one cyborg to pwning my own heart that I can own the vulnerabilities to fix it. We forget that these are devices connected to flesh and blood, a person who depends on this device to have just one more heart beat. This is a journey into the inner sanctum of living with a vulnerable device in a time where technology progression has left behind security. We can no longer have security by obscurity when it comes to devices which cyborg’s like me depend on.We should not be in the business of sacrificing security for convenience or power. As a patient, I would rather sleep knowing my device has been hardened and have the inconvenience of replacing it more regularly than the converse. I feel that we, as the security community, should be addressing and assisting medical manufacturers with the security vulnerabilities in the devices that literally keep people alive. There should be more effort placed on addressing the security vulnerabilities. The simple fact is we are not dealing with just ones and zeroes. This is, for some, a life or death situation.