Modern medical technology relies heavily on computers and software. Take an infusion pump for example. Controlled by a microcontroller and using software. Or insulin pumps; and some vendors are actually considering to add Bluetooth to insulin pumps, so that patients using such a pump can check its status on their smartphone (or on the upcomming smart watches). Also you can adjust the infusion rate of an insulin pump to accommodate for ingested sugar. Overdosing on insulin can send a person into shock and kill.
> Modern medical technology relies heavily on computers and software.
Which is why medical devices should all have ECC memory. And for that matter physical separation between any processor that might run attacker-controlled code and the processor responsible for That Which Must Not Fail.
Product defects like this are foreseeable. If bad memory can cause a medical device to kill someone, the party at fault is the one who made a medical device without sufficient redundancy and error correction that bad memory could cause it to kill someone.
It's an interesting attack vector, recently covered by Person of Interest episode, in which an abusive husband got killed by having his insulin pump wirelessly hacked and making him overdose the drug. While fiction, I'm pretty sure this kind of thing will happen (after all, no one writes bug-free software, and even if, you can always steal the keys...) - and initially will be very hard to detect because of its uncommon nature.
