MeroPalo

Apple customers with heart conditions could find out that taking their iPads to bed with them may have consequences. The matter is that tiny magnets within the iPad cover can shut off implanted defibrillators on a pacemaker if you leave the device on your chest. The same may happen if you fall asleep with the iPad lying on you.

Of course, it doesn’t seem likely as a death scenario, but it is quite surprising that the geniuses at Apple didn’t think about people with heart conditions. Actually, even a 14-year-old girl could spot this, and she did. Gianna Chien made the discovery as part of her science fair project. However, her project didn’t get first place, maybe because the judges thought that Apple was perfect and iPads can’t harm anyone. But Chien will soon again be presenting her findings to 8,000 doctors at a meeting of the Heart Rhythm Society in Denver. Hopefully, she will find a more reasonable audience there.

The girl says that if you fall asleep with the iPad2 on your chest, the magnets in the cover can “accidentally turn off” the heart device. Since her dad is a doctor, she believes that it’s pretty important that people know this. Her study found that 30% of patients with defibrillators who put Apple devices on their chest were affected by iPads. Although most defibrillators can turn back on after the magnet is removed, some of them must be reactivated manually, which may causes a life-threatening situation.

According to John Day, head of heart-rhythm services at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah, and chairman of the panel responsible for reviewing scientific papers which will be presented at the Denver meeting, Gianna Chien’s research offers a valuable warning for patients with implanted defibrillators that deliver an electric shock to restart a stopped heart.

By:
SaM

Billy Rios, a former Google employee, has revealed that his ex-employer had huge security holes at its new office in Sydney. Rios, currently working at insecurity outfit Cylance, developed a project to identify vulnerable Internet facing Industrial Control Systems (ICS).

Billy Rios admitted that the project at the moment is far from complete, however it already net one high profile customer after scanning the results. Actually, the scan turned up a Tridium Niagara device on the Internet run by the search giant is using Tridium Niagara for various Building Management Systems (BMS) in the Google Wharf 7 building.

The expert managed to conduct a quick interrogation of the Tridium device which yielded in a wealth of data about the specific platform version. It seems that the search giant was running an outdated version and the QNX OS running on an embedded device. Having a few pieces of data on hands, Billy used a custom exploit to extract the onfig.bog file, because the latter contained the specific configurations for that particular device, as well as usernames and passwords for all the users on the device. As you can understand, the data could then be decoded and voila.

Billy decided to give a call to his mates at Google. Those pulled the system offline. Rios explained that it was very important for users to realize how pervasive such hacks are. He estimated that there are tens of thousands of devices online, used by thousands of different entities which could be taken out by hackers. Thus far, Billy’s company has discovered more than 25,000 of those systems facing the Internet and if such a huge company could fall victim to an ICS attack, then anyone can.

By:
SaM

Many people know that the CIA World Factbook is a really useful resource for those who want to discover information about places they’ve never been. Experts of TechEye recently found themselves on a page which compares different countries’ Internet hosts. The interesting thing is that Antarctica – which is not even a country – takes 139th place out of 233 entries.

As you know, Antarctica is populated mainly by scientists from different countries. However, it turned out that it has a total of 7,764 hosts, which is far outranking many countries, like Jamaica, Cuba and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This figure is far outnumbering Nigeria with a very large population, which takes only 169th place, as well as Afghanistan, Iraq and the Falkland Islands, too. In addition, Antarctica is also ahead of the Isle of Man and even way ahead of the Vatican.

In the meanwhile, the top 5 of the hosts chart includes the United States (505,000,000), Japan, Brazil, Italy and China. It is also interesting that Poland, Argentina and Canada are ahead of the United Kingdom (8,107,000). India, having a population of 1.2 billion people, only has 6,746,000 Internet hosts, while China, with a similar population, can boast 20,602,000 of them.

By:
SaM