https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/03/hospital-viruses-fake-cancerous-nodes-ct-scans-created-by-malware-trick-radiologists/
By Kim Zetter
The Washington Post
April 3, 2019
When Hillary Clinton stumbled and coughed through public appearances
during her 2016 presidential run, she faced critics who said that she
might not be well enough to perform the top job in the country. To quell
rumors about her medical condition, her doctor revealed that a CT scan of
her lungs showed that she just had pneumonia.
But what if the scan had shown faked cancerous nodules, placed there by
malware exploiting vulnerabilities in widely used CT and MRI scanning
equipment? Researchers in Israel say they have developed such malware to
draw attention to serious security weaknesses in critical medical imaging
equipment used for diagnosing conditions and the networks that transmit
those images — vulnerabilities that could have potentially life-altering
consequences if unaddressed.
The malware they created would let attackers automatically add realistic,
malignant-seeming growths to CT or MRI scans before radiologists and
doctors examine them. Or it could remove real cancerous nodules and
lesions without detection, leading to misdiagnosis and possibly a failure
to treat patients who need critical and timely care.
Yisroel Mirsky, Yuval Elovici and two others at the Ben-Gurion University
Cyber Security Research Center in Israel who created the malware say that
attackers could target a presidential candidate or other politicians to
trick them into believing they have a serious illness and cause them to
withdraw from a race to seek treatment.
[...]
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