Daily Buzz

The improbably named Barnaby Jack, a researcher at security firm McAfee, was back in the news yesterday, as his hacking into an insulin pump made the rounds on the Internet. The BBC, among other news outlets, carried reports on how he was able to scan for and compromise insulin pumps that communicate wirelessly.

"We can influence any pump within a 300-ft [91-m] range," Jack told the BBC. "We can make that pump dispense its entire 300 unit reservoir of insulin and we can do that without requiring its ID number."

Jack's hack first came to prominence in March at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, where he showed how a hacker could kill a diabetic by stealing the security credentials of an insulin pump.

Similar nightmare scenarios involving implantable devices being hacked for nefarious purposes have been bruited for a couple of years now. As if we didn't have enough to worry about.