Introducing SCS Speaker Marie Moe
Do you trust software? There are situations where your life depends on software and that’s when you really want to be sure the developers know their trade.
Crossing the street when a self-driving car is approaching is one such situation. I wonder how this will make me feel in the not so distant future. Medical device software is an area where the future has already landed and where we have a lot of work ahead of us if we want to bring security best practices to hospitals around the world.
Marie Moe with a pacemaker
Five years ago, in August 2013, the grassroots movement, “I am the cavalry” was founded. And from the very start, they focused on security in the healthcare industry. A major milestone was the “Hippocratic Oath for Connected Medical Devices”, published in 2016. It’s a document that is really worth reading.
One of the drivers behind this initiative was Dr. Marie Moe from Norway. Marie’s case is special as she is not only a security expert who worked as team lead at the Norwegian Cyber Security Centre NorCERT, but also because her life depends on the software that runs her pacemaker. Without the pacemaker, her heart will stop. One single software lock – or a cryptolocker – and she’s dead. So trusting software is a very important topic in her life.
Marie Moe running a half-marathon
Modern pacemakers are configured via wireless communication from a device called the programmer. The protocols are, of course, proprietary. Marie was lucky enough to find a hospital emergency room equipped with the right type of programmer. This was essential when she suffered from a software bug that had sent her pacemaker into an emergency backup routine (with a memory dump written onto the programmer). Believe me, she has quite the story to tell.
Marie is the team lead for an information security research group within SINTEF, a huge independent research institute with over a thousand Ph.D holders in many different areas of interest. Marie also teaches Security Planning and Incident Management at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She holds a Ph.D based on her work on security and trust in dynamic networks. That topic alone would be reason enough to invite her to come and speak at Swiss Cyber Storm on October 30. But we think that her firsthand experience with medical devices and the bugs she discovered in her own pacemaker are an even better choice for our conference. Please join us and secure your ticket in time.
More about Marie Moe:
- Twitter @mariegmoe
- TEDxVicenza video: Can Hackers Break My Heart?
- Opinion piece in WIRED: Go Ahead, Hackers. Break My Heart
Christian Folini, Program Chair
