It’s possible to transmit life-threatening signals to implanted medical devices with no prior knowledge of how the devices work, researchers in Belgium and the U.K. have demonstrated.

By intercepting and reverse-engineering the signals exchanged between a heart pacemaker-defibrillator and its programmer, the researchers found they could steal patient information, flatten the device’s battery, or send malicious messages to the pacemaker. The attacks they developed can be performed from up to five meters (16 feet) away using standard equipment — but more sophisticated antennas could increase this distance by tens or hundreds of times, they said.

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