Has there been any cases of a computer break in causing the death of a person? Certainly medical devices are not on the internet, but perhaps treatment management systems, and their databases of prescription and treatment plan information are.
You mean like somebody hacks into a prescription database or doctor’s records, and causes a death?
How would that work? I can’t visualize it. That is, I can, but it’s kind of an Agatha Christie scenario–Bad Guy hacks into doctor’s records, changes prescription, Victim gets wrong medicine, dies.
But in real life? “Um…” In real life, I think it’s a little more complicated than that, and I don’t think Agatha Christie would be up to the task. You’d probably have to have the guy who wrote The Matrix figure out how it would work. 
Quite possibly. You might be interested in trawling the archives of The Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems for related stories.
hmmm… I’d say there’s very little risk at present, as (at my doc’s anyway) the doc inputs your details, decides what mediaction to give you, then prints it off… there’s almost no time for anyone to interfere, and I think it’s currently a closed system. However, there is a system in the works to allow the doc to transmit a script straight to the pharmacy, instead of issuing bits of paper - I guess there’s a potential risk if someone interferes with that transmission.
Alternatively, someone could hack a patients files and remove allergy information - say, to penicillin, so the patient might die from being prescribed the wrong stuff.
but it’s fairly unlikely while most (if not all) of our medical procedures are human-based. When you have to type your symptoms into a robodoc, and it churns out the appropriate medecine - now there’s an easy way to kill someone by hacking the bot…
It wasn’t over the Internet, I don’t think, but in an episode of Law & Order a kid was able to cause several deaths of diabetics in a hospital by introducing a virus into a machine that kept track of their insulin doses. It MIGHT have been over the 'net, tho. The kid might have hacked into the medical software company’s LAN and then introduced the virus which made it on to a disk that went into the hospital’s machine. Scary stuff.
It wasn’t over the Internet, I don’t think, but in an episode of Law & Order a kid was able to cause several deaths of diabetics in a hospital by introducing a virus into a machine that kept track of their insulin doses. It MIGHT have been over the 'net, tho. The kid might have hacked into the medical software company’s LAN and then introduced the virus which made it on to a disk that went into the hospital’s machine. Scary stuff.
Well, I did work on treatment management software for dialysis. While you’re right, ShadowWarrior things are human-based, I know of one case where the RN drew meds based on the computer’s records (the system I worked on) instead of the patient’s chart. This did kill the patient. The system was never to be used that way, but despite the rules, it happened. That system was isolated from the internet, however.