By Laura Hood
If you think it’s enough of a chore trying to stop thieves stealing your credit card details and hacking your Facebook, imagine trying to stop them getting into your pancreas. Advances in healthcare mean that in-body devices to treat chronic conditions, or even just make you perform better as a human being, are not as far away as you might imagine.
Some of these innovations already exist. The pacemaker has been around for years, and drug delivery implants are already quite advanced. Some are controlled remotely, and many more will be in the future, significantly raising the stakes in the battle to protect ourselves from cyber-crime.
When TV series “Homeland” featured a storyline in which terrorists hacked the US Vice President’s pacemaker, causing him to have a heart attack, it brought this issue into the public consciousness. But the scenario has been possible for some time, says Sadie Creese, Director of the Global Centre for Cyber Security Capacity at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, and more people will be vulnerable in the future.
