Motherboard is reporting that University of South Alabama Students hacked a pacemaker in a simulated human and the results were as expected: a real person would be dead.
The students ran their tests on iStan, a $100,000 “advanced wireless patient simulator on the market, with internal robotics that mimic human cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological systems.” iStan is produced by CAE Healthcare and used in hospitals to teach students how to properly treat patients. Students worked on hacking its pacemaker and found that they were able to speed the heart up, slow it down or repeatedly shock it with an internal defibrillator.
Mike Jacobs, director of the simulations program at University of South Alabama, said that it is not just pacemakers that are vulnerable, because “we could do it with an insulin pump, a number of things that would cause life-threatening injuries or death.”