Can pacemakers be hacked?

Here’s a heart-stopping cyber-threat: Your pacemaker could get hacked.

The Food and Drug Administration this week published guidelines to help medical manufacturers prevent hackers from breaking into implantable devices that operate with the help of cloud-based networks.

Those include pacemakers, defibrillators and insulin pumps, whose manufacturers increasingly are loading them with software updates to improve performance and gather data.

In its report, the FDA didn’t shy away from painting a horror scenario, one in which a researcher notifies a manufacturer that its implantable device “can be reprogrammed by an unauthorized user.”

“If exploited, this vulnerability could result in permanent impairment, a life-threatening injury, or death,” according to the FDA.

Click for more from the New York Post.