Cyber hacking and medical risks of
innovative medical devices
Dr KK Aggarwal
Imagine someone hacking your insulin pump and increase
or decrease doses of insulin delivered. Similarly, someone
can hack your pacemaker functioning, your private health data from
the cloud and use it the way they want.
DCGI has now issued certain models are vulnerable
to hackers. The drug regulator has issued a medical device alert over four
models of Medtronics. MiniMed Paradigm (MMT-715, MMT-712, MMT-722) and MiniMed
Paradigm Veo (MMT-754) can be hacked by a person with special
technical skills who could tweak insulin delivery dosage of the user patient.
These insulin pumps are designed to communicate using
wireless radio frequency (RF) with other devices such as blood glucose meters,
glucose sensor transmitters and certain CareLink USB devices. An unauthorised
person with special technical skills and equipment could potentially connect
wirelessly to a nearby insulin pump to change the settings and control insulin
delivery.
The DCGI has appealed to medical directors, healthcare
professionals, distributors, users and staff involved in management of patients
to check if the model and software version of the insulin pump fall amongst the
four risky models. If they do, patients should switch to a model with
more cyber security protection.
Patients should not share the pump serial number with
anyone, and be attentive to pump notifications, alarms and alerts. A patient
should monitor his/her blood glucose levels closely. Connect the Medtronic
insulin pump to other Medtronic devices and software only. It is also advisable
to disconnect the USB device from your computer when you are not using it to
download data from your pump. [The Hindu]
Dr KK Aggarwal
Padma Shri Awardee
President Elect Confederation of
Medical Associations in Asia and Oceania
(CMAAO)
Group Editor-in-Chief IJCP Publications
President Heart Care Foundation of
India
Past National President
IMA
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