Cylance’s Robert Portvliet, Technical Director of Red Team services at Cylance, is presenting at ToorCon in San Diego on Saturday, September 2 on the subject of medical device attacks. In his talk, you’ll learn about current network-connected medical devices and their many security vulnerabilities.

Robert will focus on the methodology and approach to penetration testing of modern medical devices. You’ll get an overview of the various stages of a medical device assessment, including:

Discovery and analysis of a device’s remote and local attack surface

Reverse engineering and exploitation of proprietary network protocols

Vulnerability discovery in network services

Compromising supporting systems

Attacking common wireless protocols

Exploitation of hardware debug interfaces and bus protocols

Assessing proprietary wireless technologies

In Robert’s talk, you’ll hear about real world vulnerabilities that he’s discovered during medical device penetration testing assessments, including:

Weak cryptographic implementations

Device impersonation and data manipulation vulnerabilities in proprietary protocols

Unauthenticated database interfaces

Hardcoded credentials/keys and other sensitive information stored in firmware/binaries

The susceptibility of medical devices to remote denial of service attacks

Also included in his talk will be some suggestions on how some of the most common classes of medical device vulnerabilities might be remediated by vendors, and also how hospitals and other healthcare providers can defend their medical devices in the meantime.

Robert Portvliet

Robert Portvliet is the Technical Director of Red Team services at Cylance, with over 8 years’ experience in various disciplines of penetration testing. His focus is on embedded systems and wireless penetration testing and reverse engineering. Prior to joining Cylance, he was the network security service line lead for Foundstone and taught the ‘Ultimate Hacking: Wireless’ class at BlackHat 2011-2013.