>after the first death from a hacked pacemaker, the outcry will be heard from the moon //

Isn't the problem that there will always be a way to kill people, even remotely without touching them (sniper, poison mail, gas bomb, massive microwave in a van that you park next to them, ...). You perhaps don't want to make it easy but it's also not necessarily sensible to waste money on an arms race that you'll never win.

Similarly we don't have enclosed station platforms (in the UK) despite people having been pushed in front of trains in the past.

I had not thought of the rise of microwave terrorism (perhaps with the skin-burning crowd disperser (citation not found) it's already on us).

But my basic tenant is that we / society has an acceptable balance of risk and benefit. Maybe not a rational one but one that is understood by most people. For cars it's pretty high on the risk tolerance. For medical drugs it's really low. For computer hacking it's low too - cf Aaron Schwartz. I would say that medical devices combine low risk tolerance of drugs and low risk tolerance of hacking - making the spectre of hacked implanted devices front page news.

I expect it will be pretty simple to defeat however - only allow networking of a device over near field radio (RFID style). that way there is no remote access in a body, and do a similar thing for any robots or monitors - the only way to connect a surgical robot to the Internet is with a doctors own personal RFID - tcpip convertor, that he takes away with him or is counts back into stores next to the nurses. Massively dropping the risk ratio with a few simple rules.

we can do this - we just need to be sensible about it

Ps Westminster and canary wharf do have enclosed tube platforms so people cannot jump / be pushed. Because we cannot have bankers or politicians delayed by poverty stricken depressives ...

The risk is exactly that you can't tell it was hacked. Then the manufacturer might end up being liable.

The difference being that it's tough to kill people at scale and covertly with a rifle or even poison mail. Exploiting a bug in networked pacemakers could give you the means to kill an entire userbase.

For the train comparison, it's the difference between pushing a guy on the rails and derailing a train remotely by accelerating it remotely through a curve and disabling the manual controls.

What's the value to the user of a networked pacemaker? Maybe a lower price? There would be better ways for it to 'speak' to a network to collect data, I should think.

> What's the value to the user of a networked pacemaker? Maybe a lower price?

Fewer surgeries to get to the physical device and change settings. Therefore, longer life expectancy.

This bug might be a feature.

That is just an (excellent) argument for medical devices to have some kind of connectivity to the outside world, but not for having the actual device ever connected to the Internet.

Strict air gaps would be desirable.

Excellent point.

The difference is that snipers et al require targeted effort. Hacking hospital equitment allows for mass destruction.

They don't need to do the calculation because their intuition already leads them to the right decision. This is just economics. What is the payoff for the evildoer hacking a pacemaker? Oh right, he's a contract killer? Too many movies for you. It's just more profitable to replace the payment processing app with your own payment skimming app at some big store.

Re intutition, there are several statistically observable anomalies in human decision-making.

http://www.investopedia.com/university/behavioral_finance/

(note the article is in several sections)