During the Mobile World Congress MWC 2019 in Barcelona, Kaspersky Lab specialists demonstrated the vulnerability of cybernetic prostheses to hacker attacks for the first time in the world.
A hand prosthesis by the Russian company Motorica, which specializes in the development of modern bionic upper limb prostheses, was used as the experimental parts of the cyborgs.
Vladimir Dashchenko, head of the industrial automation and Internet of things vulnerability research group at Kaspersky Lab, neatly avoids the terms “hack” and “hack”, stating that his employees are “looking for vulnerabilities”. With the advent of IoT technologies, the threat of hacking has increased significantly. For example, today you can even enter the system through fire detectors or surveillance cameras.
Motorica itself approached Kaspersky Lab with a request to test the resistance of its smart bionic prostheses to cyber threats. A modern bionic prosthesis periodically dumps telemetry into the cloud, and laboratory specialists took advantage of this right at a press conference to take over control, log into the system as an administrator and gain access to private information. Since the information flows in one direction, it was not possible to gain access to the prosthesis itself, but this was not required. Kaspersky Lab has simply demonstrated the future vulnerability of biotic devices, essentially breaking into a cyborg for the first time in the world.
“New technologies open up a new world for us, in which bionic implants and assistive devices empower people. And we believe that it is extremely important for manufacturers of such devices to interact with the developers of security solutions. This is the only way to prevent even theoretically possible attacks on the human body,”said Motorica CEO Ilya Chekh.
Read our interview with Konstantin Deblikov, owner of two hand prostheses, here.
Alexander the Greek
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