Potential Hacking Leads to Investigation Into Medtronic Insulin Pumps

An interesting set of circumstances have forced Medtronic to launch an investigation into their Insulin Pumps after a potential cybersecurity breach presented itself. It turns out that the medical devices can be hacked and re-programmed via the internet to potentially cause diabetic patients to overdose on their insulin.

The problems with the devices began as Medtronic’s Paradigm insulin pumps seem to have a software complication that was caught by the antivirus program, McAfee. The officials at McAfee have stated that these kinds of complications could also exist in other types of drug pumps also. These days, with technological advances being what they are, more medical devices are starting to rely heavily on wireless technology and software that have the potential to be hacked via the internet.

Medtronic made the announcement that it is trying to get software security experts to “look into the problem, but there have been no known incidents of insulin pump hacking. About 200,000 patients currently use various Medtronic Insulin Pumps.”

This concern first came out into the open during the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas back in August when Jerome Radcliffe gave a demonstration on how easy it was to hack into an insulin pump and change the dosage from far away. He kept the fact that it was a Medtronic pump until he started to think that the company was downplaying this security problem. They did so by releasing a press release that claimed the security of the device was not a real concern.

Since August, Radcliffe has worked with the Department of Homeland Security and the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) to push insulin pump vendors to address the problem seriously. Medtronic’s announcement of an investigation came after it received letters from both CERT and after Congress requested a Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation into the issue.

With technology making computerized medical devices all the rage in medical circles, it was just a matter of time before that technology found a glitch that made the devices extremely dangerous. If you are hoping to get more information about this and other medical device recalls, you can easily find all of the information you need in the virtual blizzard that is the internet, however you can spend scouring the net only to find complicated and outdated information. Let me save you some time by pointing out that I found my information on medicaldevicerecall.com it is a great resource for finding out about the newest drug recalls and drug side effects, and I check out the site regularly to remain up to date.