The biggest danger to internet-connected medical devices

Security researcher Beau Woods will never forget the day he got a call from the natal intensive care unit. The fetal heart monitors kept rebooting, putting infant lives at risk. The Zotob worm was big that year, and the malware—designed to steal credit card details, but so poorly coded that it caused the devices it affected to repeatedly reboot—had infected many machines at the hospital where he worked. The physicians felt powerless to do anything. Could Woods help? The Zotob authors were eventually apprehended and sent to prison. They clearly never intended their malware to hurt anyone, much less put premature babies in hospitals at risk. They were criminals looking to make a quick buck.