Hacker found dead just days before he was due to demonstrate how to kill someone fitted with a pacemaker

Always a bad idea to brag about being able to hack pace makers from 30 feet away. Imagine all the old fuckers with power that he pissed off. This would of been a genocide of some of the most angry old fuckers in the world. Damn straight this was murder.

(Mystery surrounds the death of a celebrated computer hacker who claimed to know how to remotely kill someone fitted with a heart pacemaker – as happened in the fictional TV spy drama Homeland.) Barnaby Jack died in San Francisco on Thursday, just days before he was due to give a speech revealing how implanted heart devices were at risk from fatal hacking attacks. The San Francisco Medical Examiner’s office confirmed the death last night but did not give any  further details. New Zealand-born Jack, 35, was scheduled to be one of the star guests at the Black Hat hacking convention in Las Vegas next week. In a presentation called Hacking Humans, he was planning to highlight the shortcomings of commonly used pacemaker machines by demonstrating how he could hack into them and kill the heart patient from 50ft away with a deadly power surge triggered by a wireless transmitter. An episode of the acclaimed US series Homeland, starring Damian Lewis and Claire Danes, showed a terrorist using a computer to hack into the Vice-President’s pacemaker and speed up his heartbeat until it kills him. In Homeland, the killer needed the serial number of the pacemaker, but Jack argued that in real life it was even simpler and knowing the code was not necessary. In a recent blog, he said: ‘The only implausible aspect of the hack was the range in which the attack was carried out. 'The attacker would have had to be in the same building or have a transmitter set up closer to the target. With that said, the scenario was not too far-fetched.’ He said some pacemakers could be commanded to deliver a deadly 830-volt shock from someone on a laptop up to 50ft away, the result of poor software programming by medical device companies.