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IOActive researcher Barnaby Jack has reverse-engineered a pacemaker transmitter to make it possible to deliver deadly electric shocks to pacemakers within 30 feet and rewrite their firmware.

The effect of the wireless attacks could not be overstated — in a speech at the BreakPoint security conference in Melbourne today, Jack said such attacks were tantamount to “anonymous assassination”, and in a realistic but worse-case scenario, “mass murder”.

In a video demonstration, which Jack declined to release publicly because it may reveal the name of the manufacturer, he issued a series of 830 volt shocks to the pacemaker using a laptop.

The pacemakers contained a “secret function” which could be used to activate all pacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) in a 30 foot -plus vicinity.

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Australian authorities are thanking the crew of an Air Canada flight for helping to locate a sailor in distress off the country’s east coast.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said Tuesday it received an emergency beacon activation at 8:15 a.m. local time, coming from approximately 270 nautical miles (500 kilometres) east of Sydney.

The AMSA requested Air Canada Flight AC033, a Boeing 777 en route from Vancouver to Sydney with 270 passengers and 18 crew aboard, to divert to the area of the beacon.

Capt. Andrew Robertson, of Vancouver, who was piloting the Air Canada flight, says he was contacted by Australian air traffic control and asked to help.

There’s a ship, a yacht in distress, may have sunk, and you are the closest aircraft. Would you be able to assist,” was the message Robertson said he received.

He asked for the location of the boat so that he and his crew could determine if they had the fuel to search for the boat in distress.

“Once we’d put that into our computer … we actually determined that we had the fuel,” Robertson said.

Read the full article here.  It was nice to see that the passengers were cool with it.