Well I am a bit bummed out at the moment. As you may recall, around the beginning of this year I bounced over to England to be with my mother when she had a pacemaker implanted. It never struck me that this pacemaker could be the target of hacker attacks...

I really, REALLY dislike folks who do harm to others. I do understand the attraction of hacking into computers and creating things like worms that can bypass security systems ... what I don’t understand is the folks who do this with malicious intent. I just cannot wrap my brain around the fact that someone would deliberately release a computer virus that would delete other folks' files and obliterate hundreds of thousands of hours of people's labors...

But these drongos are out there... and they really don’t care who they hurt. Which is why I was particularly concerned when – just a few minutes ago as I pen these words – I received an email from Neal Leavitt of Leavitt Communications (www.leavcom.com).

In addition to running Leavitt Communications, Neal is also a contributing editor to a number of technology/marketing publications, one of which is IEEE’s Computer. Neal was kind enough to send me a rather interesting article he's written that was published by the IEEE Computer Society.

In this article, Neal talks about the increasing use of implantable medical devices (IMDs) in general, the fact that more and more are using wireless technology, and the fact that unless their designers take action, these devices may be susceptible to hackers. As a worst case scenario, a hacker could send harmful commands to an implanted insulin pump or pacemaker or defibrillator.

This is very, very scary...

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