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When Hillary Clinton stumbled/coughed thru '16 presidential run, rumor spread about her health, until her doctor said a CT scan of her lungs showed she just had pneumonia. But what if hackers had altered those scans to inject fake cancerous nodules onto it?washingtonpost.com/technology/201…
Researchers in Israel have created proof-of-concept malware that alters CT and MRI scans in real-time on hospital networks to add realistic, malignant-seeming growths to scans before radiologists/doctors examine them or remove real cancerous nodules/lesions without detection.
In blind study using real CT lung scans, 70 of which were altered by their malware, they tricked three skilled radiologists into misdiagnosing patients nearly every time. Even a state-of-the-art lung-cancer screening software tool was tricked by their cancer-producing malware.
Attackers could alter random scans to create chaos in hospitals or mistrust in diagnoses, or target specific patients, such as a presidential candidate to trick them into believing they have a serious illness and cause them to withdraw from a race to seek treatment.
The attackers could even alter follow-up scans after treatment begins to falsely show tumors spreading or shrinking. Or they could alter scans for patients in drug and medical research trials to sabotage the results.
Here's a video showing how the researchers' malware works and how they were able to slip it onto the network of a hospital in Israel to test their attack - it took just 30 seconds to install with physical access, but could be done remotely as well
The problem lies in PACS networks hospitals use to transmit scans unencrypted/unsigned. In a Shodan search, the researchers found at least 800 PACS networks directly accessible via internet. DHS issued alerts last yr showing security probs w/PACS networks ics-cert.us-cert.gov/advisories/ICS…
