Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney was the 46th Vice President of the United States. He served under President George W. Bush from 2001to 2009. He has for years now warned Americans that they need to be on guard against terrorist threats.
Cheney has taken his own warnings to heart, literally. During a recent interview with Sanjay Gupta of CBS News's 60 Minutes, Cheney appeared with one of his doctors and they revealed that Cheney had his pacemaker’s wireless feature disabled back in 2007.
Cheney told Gupta that he did so fearing a terrorist could assassinate him by sending a signal to the device.
Jonathan Reiner, Cheney's cardiologist, told 60 Minutes, “It seemed to me to be a bad idea for the vice president to have a device that maybe somebody on a rope line or in the next hotel room or downstairs might be able to get into — hack into. And I worried that someone could kill him."
Cheney says, "I found it credible." Cheney spoke of an episode of the Showtime drama Homeland that featured a similar scenario that involved a pacemaker and an assassination plot.
"Because I know from the experience we had and the necessity for adjusting my own device that it was an accurate portrayal of what was possible," Cheney said about the show.
Pacemaker’s have been hacked in the past. Last fall, late IOActive researcher Barnaby Jack claimed that he could hack a pacemaker from 50 feet away, causing it to deliver a lethal 830-volt shock.
Farinaz Koushanfar, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, says, “This is really a life threatening issue. If somebody can hop on the Internet and steal data or see your financial transactions, that’s one thing. But if someone controls your bodily activities and even changes your heart rate, that’s another thing.”
Koushanfar and her colleagues have developed a new protocol. This new protocol comes with the potential to protect against some of this threat. They call the new protocol Heart-to-Heart. Heart-to-Heart is not the only technology made to address hacking IMDs. There is also wireless frequency jammer and an ultrasound device that determines the proximity of the person looking to access the IMD.
The FDA has urged medical device companies to enhance their security on IMD’s. As America’s population ages more and more people are relying on IMD’s so it important that new technologies be created to protect those using them from potential external threats.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
