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Fake Cancerous Nodes in CT Scans, Created By Malware, Trick Radiologists (washingtonpost.com)
Researchers in Israel created malware to draw attention to serious security weaknesses in medical imaging equipment and networks. An anonymous reader shares a report: Researchers in Israel say they have developed malware to draw attention to serious security weaknesses in critical medical imaging equipment used for diagnosing conditions and the networks that transmit those images -- vulnerabilities that could have potentially life-altering consequences if unaddressed. The malware they created would let attackers automatically add realistic, malignant-seeming growths to CT or MRI scans before radiologists and doctors examine them. Or it could remove real cancerous nodules and lesions without detection, leading to misdiagnosis and possibly a failure to treat patients who need critical and timely care.
Yisroel Mirsky, Yuval Elovici and two others at the Ben-Gurion University Cyber Security Research Center in Israel who created the malware say that attackers could target a presidential candidate or other politicians to trick them into believing they have a serious illness and cause them to withdraw from a race to seek treatment. The research isn't theoretical. In a blind study the researchers conducted involving real CT lung scans, 70 of which were altered by their malware, they were able to trick three skilled radiologists into misdiagnosing conditions nearly every time. In the case of scans with fabricated cancerous nodules, the radiologists diagnosed cancer 99 percent of the time. In cases where the malware removed real cancerous nodules from scans, the radiologists said those patients were healthy 94 percent of the time.
Yisroel Mirsky, Yuval Elovici and two others at the Ben-Gurion University Cyber Security Research Center in Israel who created the malware say that attackers could target a presidential candidate or other politicians to trick them into believing they have a serious illness and cause them to withdraw from a race to seek treatment. The research isn't theoretical. In a blind study the researchers conducted involving real CT lung scans, 70 of which were altered by their malware, they were able to trick three skilled radiologists into misdiagnosing conditions nearly every time. In the case of scans with fabricated cancerous nodules, the radiologists diagnosed cancer 99 percent of the time. In cases where the malware removed real cancerous nodules from scans, the radiologists said those patients were healthy 94 percent of the time.
If you give doctor faked imaging scans, he might diagnose wrong?
But who in their right mind would connect an MRI machine to the internet? At my work we didn't even have the scanning electron microscope connected to it because of this.
-- Cheers!
The real story here is that the researchers developed an AI capable of detecting cancer nodules in CT and MRI scans with 94% accuracy. I mean, if it can find them to remove them...it can find them. That seems like pretty high accuracy for computer aided diagnostics.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
That we have to protect all technology against psychopathic super-assholes.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Shame if it got corrupted somehow and you got sued.
Need consulting services to protect yourself? Virus protection subscription?
https://www.healthimaging.com/...
I have bone spurs, honest!
Table-ized A.I.
I mean children. Children. Think of the children.
I can hardly wait for the cancer-fu filter so i can p'shop my own CT images.
The whole medical field is weak. We are now in the era of imaging instead of thinking. From what I've seen of doctors, they are the sloppiest, laziest thinkers out there.
https://westjem.com/case-repor...
When Rick Scott was overseeing the largest Medicare patient fraud in US history in the 90s, their primary method was to fake test results and bill for unnecessary care. A medical provider today would pay big under the table to be hit with this particular malware. They could easily claim ignorance and get away with providing billions in unnecessary cancer care.
I appreciate the stunning and scary significance of the advanced malware that is able to "realistically" modify medical imagery in a way that coerces doctor into misdiagnosis. However, I do not see any description of the attack vector? I only read the free version of the article, so I could be completely missing it. Sorry, if so!!
Will
remove nospam. to email!
Look at the demo video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... .
As someone who looks at such things for a living, I find this interesting but not so compelling. For the example of just a single injected nodule, I thought it looked unnatural. But, how it is perceived depends on how it is presented. Suppose they presented the images to real radiologists this way, "You will be looking at films that might be real or might be faked, guess which is which", then I think that most radiologists would know that the single nodule was not natural. But, if presented this way, "Look at these films and see if there is anything abnormal", then many would have fallen for it. But likewise many would have been thinking, "It is probably cancer, because it is a solid nodule, but it looks rather odd."
In comparison, the 472 nodule example was obviously fake. The nodules were all far too similar, too round, too uniform, too dense. I doubt many radiologists would have fallen for that.
If the authors intent was to show that fake imagery can be made that could be used for nefarious deception, then I think we already knew of that concern. I would say that I have seen far more credible and persuasive false CGI than what was seen here. If Pixar for example decided to make fake x-rays, I suspect they could do a much better job of it.
This brings up a question that seems far more interesting to me. If an AI agent can make a fake image that can fool some experts under certain conditions, but the fakery can also be recognized, then can there be a second AI agent that can spot the fakery created by the first AI?
What do you think?
Because.... ???
Oh! That's right! Because most SEMs are run by Windows XP or older...
- It's Windows
- It's OLD Windows
- It's maintained by some retired IT guy
- It's got an inch of dust inside
- There's a serial port with a badly-hand-soldered connection involved somewhere, I'm sure
- The retired IT guy still blames everything on the "one stop bit or two" conundrum.
This isn't encrypting somebody's pictures and music files and demanding a $500 gift card to 'unlock' them, this is straight up attempted murder.
Can any 'hacker' who tries this shit take being raped in the ass by Bubba for years on end?
These are extremely dangerous waters for anyone to tread in; basically they are saying "we won't murder your patients if you pay us". The response and penalties are raised to a much higher level than if they were encrypting a company's important financial documents.
If any hacker ring tried some shit like this, they can expect the troopers with heavy weaponry, armored cars with the battering ram on it, and body armor to bust down their door. Imagine how they will feel when their heads are instantly slammed into the floor, and some big strong dude who is wearing more padding than an American football player and shoving a gun into their temples whilst digging their knee with the force of all the armor/body weight behind it into their backs, is telling them "don't you fucking blink, or I swear to God, you will die right where you lay!"
I hope anyone stupid enough to attempt anything like this spends the rest of their lives in PMITA prison with no possibility of parole. If anybody dies as a result of their actions, they get the death penalty.
I'm wondering if any kind of modern critical device has been manufactured with a "send only" network link, where it is physically impossible for the device to recieve any data. An operator would push a button on a console, and a blob gets sent to a recieving computer where data integrity is checked and verified. Remote monitoring would be a good application for this where the device sends 'blobs' out automatically at regular intervals.
It won't stop all malicious attacks, but it will greatly help with security
attackers could target a presidential candidate or other politicians to trick them into believing they have a serious illness and cause them to withdraw from a race to seek treatment
Sen. Michael Bennet says he has prostate cancer; Dem's planned 2020 run depends on health
Frightening.
We can make it look like you have cancer, pump you full of chemo and kill you.
We can make it look like you dont have cancer, and let you die a painful, miserable death without any form of treatment.
This is also going to breathe wind in to the sails of so-called Targeted Individuals (TI). TI's will begin to insist that their delusions are real and that their diagnostic scans have been faked to convince them Big Brother didnt put a chip in their brain.
I understand wanting to make the technology more secure, but does that always involve the manufacturing of what is basically a weapon?