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Malware Can Add or Remove Cancer Cells to CT Scans – PCMag.com


The security researchers wanted to highlight how important it is that we protect our medical professionals and the tech they rely on from malware.


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When your computer is infected with malware it can be very frustrating and even costly if you lose work or pay the ransomware demand. But what about if malware was used to alter medical tests? Security researchers just proved how easy it is to achieve.

As Engadget reports, a research team at the Ben Gurion University Cyber Security Research Center in Israel created malware that can infect diagnostic tools located in hospitals and other medical facilities and alter test results. To demonstrate how effective such an attack is, the researchers focused on altering CT scans taken to detect lung cancer.

The malware used deep learning and a “3D conditional GAN” to carry out the attack and data manipulation, with the GAN being a machine learning system called a Generative Adversarial Network. GANs typically use two neural networks in contest to generate authentic-looking photographs. This in turn allowed CT scans to be manipulated to add or remove cancer cells before being presented to three expert radiologists for evaluation.

Of most concern is how good the manipulated CT scans are. When fake cancer cells were added to a scan, the radiologists diagnosed cancer 99 percent of the time. When real cancer cells were hidden, the radiologists returned a verdict of no cancer 94 percent of the time. It’s important to note that manipulating each scan only takes a matter of milliseconds according to the researchers.

When the radiologists were made aware of the manipulation, they still diagnosed fake cancer 60 percent of the time and no cancer 87 percent of the time.

It’s not hard to imagine how useful and therefore lucrative malware like this could be for hacker/criminals targeting a specific person undergoing testing. We’ve seen a number of cases recently of ransomware infecting hospital computers and impacting patient treatment. This malware is a much more extreme case, but highlights how important it is that medical facilities take network security very seriously.



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