Feeling Less Than Secure
Google Reader was a non-stop stream of unsettling news this morning.
First up: Apparently pacemakers can be disabled remotely. What? We're outraged at the prospect of cars or iphones having a remote kill switch, but somehow we let one in our grandparents slip by unnoticed? (via BB)
Next: With a couple hours and $100 of equipment, a University of Amsterdam security researcher cloned and altered a 'Fakeproof' british microchipped passport, which supposedly compares biometric information about the holder against a secure, international database.
The tests for The Times were conducted by Jeroen van Beek, a security
researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Building on research from the UK,
Germany and New Zealand, Mr van Beek has developed a method of reading,
cloning and altering microchips so that they are accepted as genuine by
Golden Reader, the standard software used by the International Civil
Aviation Organisation to test them. It is also the software recommended for
use at airports.
Using his own software, a publicly available programming code, a £40 card reader and two £10 RFID chips, Mr van Beek took less than an hour to clone and manipulate two passport chips to a level at which they were ready to be planted inside fake or stolen paper passports.
From The Times Online via BB
And finally, the New Yorker has a typically well-written article on a horrifying new strain of treatment-resistant superbugs that may kill us all. The culprits? Globalization, unsanitary hospitals, and over-use of antibiotics.
Ten years ago, the Institute of M edicine of the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, D.C., assessed the economic impact of resistant microbes in the United States at up to five billion dollars, and experts now believe the figure to be much higher. In July, 2004, the Infectious Diseases Society of America...estimated ninety thousand deaths annually in U.S. hospitals owing to bacterial infection, more than seventy per cent had been caused by organisms that were resistant to at least one of the drugs commonly used to treat them.
Drawing on these data, collected mostly from hospitals in large urban areas which are affiliated with medical schools, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found more than a hundred thousand cases of gram-negative antibiotic-resistant bacteria. No precise numbers for all infections, including those outside hospitals, have been calculated, but the C.D.C. also reported that, among gram-negative hospital-acquired infections, about twenty per cent were resistant to state-of-the-art drugs.
The researcher's eventual conclusion:
“We can temper things, we might be able to slow the rate of emergence of resistance, but it’s unlikely that we will ever be able to conquer it.”
Full article at The New Yorker
