Gearfuse

I’ve been DJing since I was 15. Never professionally, only at parties, the occasional event or for my own pleasure. My first set of decks were made up of old Numark belt-driven turntables. After I got a little better, I bought Technics 1200s with Ortofon cartridges and a nice Rane mixer. That lasted me until I went digital and started using M-Audio’s Torq Xponent controller in conjunction with Traktor 3 on my Macbook.

Now it’s 2009. For the last few weeks, I’ve been messing around with the Tonium Pacemaker. It’s a rather expensive little DJ device coming in at around $850 but it packs a lot of power.
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Pacemakers are turning out to be more problematic than their original conception intended. The electronic device that runs the arterial show can not only be controlled wirelessly, but can also be deactivated by nearby MP3 headphones. Research teams are suggesting that patients wearing a pacemaker should stay more than three centimeters away from such devices as the interference from the headphones could prove fatal by temporarily deactivating the pacemaker.

Scientists are now completely re-thinking the pacemaker. The cloaking device was the first step to pacemaker-hacking prevention. Unfortunately, someone must now come up with a pacemaker not affected by the headphones. Remember to never walk through a retirement home with your new iPod.

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Remember that fishy business about the potential for hackers to prematurely shut off a pacemaker via a wireless communicator? Since many people use pacemakers to keep their heart beating, scientists are taking this loophole extremely seriously and have raised a solution to the issue.

Proposed is a cloaking device, an external attachment that the pacemaker owner would wear, resembling a medical bracelet. The cloaking device would prevent any harmful form of remote access to the pacemaker, keeping the wearer safe from any malicious wireless attacks. The cloaking device would be removable just in case doctors need to modify the pacemaker as needed. Ain’t nobody shuttin’ my heart down, girlfriend!

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Kevin Fu, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his team have been working with pacemakers for quite some time. Having reverse engineered a pacemaker, the team found a frightening loop hole. It turns out that a built-in test mechanism for the device includes a bug that can be exploited by hackers.

There is no cryptographic key used to secure the wireless communication between the control device and the pacemaker. This makes it real easy to build your own wireless device that can control the pacemaker. And by “control the pacemaker,” I mean shut it off. Hopefully, this discovery will lead to defense mechanisms put in place that’ll defend those who wear a pacemaker from any remote attack on their heart. Until then, you might want to keep your pacemaker on the DL.

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