Here’s an interesting video. It’s pretty boring and filled with techno mumbo jumbo, so you may not want to watch it all the way through, BUT the big takeaway is it shows a hack to remotely crash a St. Jude Medical pacemaker.
Sheesh you MIGHT be able to kill someone by remote control. There is a BIG MAYBE that I discuss below.
Okay it took over over 3 hours to hack into the device. I suspect the time indicated was just run time to allow a brute force attack as it looked like an open loop attack (one-way from the hacking device to the pacemaker). It might have crashed the pacemaker in less than 3 hours. An attack could be executed while someone was sleeping, which would allow plenty of run time.
Now for the truth in lending part. It’s hard to tell if this is a real threat. The company that released the video is Muddy Waters LLC which makes money by taking down companies and SHORT SELLING their stock as it plummets. St. Jude Medical is in a $25 Billion acquisition deal by Abbott Laboratories which means lots of “gamblers” are betting on the stock. Stock prices generally rise during the speculation time of a big takeover. If you take a short position and the price tumbles after this inflationary jump in price, cha-ching, big buck$ are made. With a $25 Billion dollar deal, BILLION$$ can be made with a huge short position. This sort “investment behavior” is why I ranted earlier that the SEC needs to stop short-selling-gambling. You can read my earlier rant here.
To get my political musings in, think about which presidential candidate is in bed with big Wall Street money. Do you think she will call for trading reform?
Second truth in lending. There may be a real concern about a hack. The company, MedSec, published their research that the St. Jude Medical devices have security flaws.
Third truth in lending. MedSec has a financial deal with Muddy Waters to license their research and to share in profits derived from their research.
What a convoluted arrangement of money shifting and back scratching!
This reminds me of the great junk bond days. Ruin good companies and make money! The gamblers just found a new way to play their game.
And we wonder why we don’t have good jobs in this country…