A Possibly Deadly Software Bug In Tandem Diabetes Care App
This Time It Was A Bug …
As our world is being taken over by smart devices the possibility of a software bug or virus causing the loss of life quickly grows. While losing control of your identity, money or data thanks to a hack is certainly horrifying, it doesn’t compare to the horrific results of a hack targeting something you rely on to survive. The iOS app from Tandem Diabetes Care which controls implanted insulin pumps is sadly an example of this possibility.
The FDA was forced to put a recall in place after over 200 users of the app were injured when their pumps stopped functioning properly. The app can crash and when it does it starts up again immediately; this would be a good thing if that restart loop didn’t significantly drain the pump’s battery. This led to people thinking they were getting their full dose of insulin, when in fact they were not.
In this case it was an unintentional bug, but it highlights the trouble that could be caused by a bad actor actively targeting these types of devices. If you know anyone using the Apple iOS t:connect mobile app used in conjunction with t:slim X2 insulin pump with Control-IQ technology, make sure they are aware of this issue.
Tandem Diabetes Care, Inc. is recalling version 2.7 (released February 12, 2024 on the Apple iOS platform) of the t:connect mobile app used in conjunction with t:slim X2 insulin pump with Control-IQ technology by correction. The reason for the recall is due to an issue with the software that may cause the mobile app to crash and be automatically relaunched by the iOS operating system.
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Please don’t spread paranoia about hackers attacking diabetes pumps to harm people, it has literally never happened. What has happened, though, and caused real harm is that manufacturers have used this threat as an excuse to lock down the devices so that there is no way that owners of these pumps can interact with them other than ways proscribed by the factory.
We have ended up in a situation where people who own the pumps and have a legitimate need to retrieve data or change settings are locked out while hackers with the skills to reverse engineer the protocols, with the much simpler goal of causing mayhem would simply be doing mundane hacking tasks that they do every day.
Theoretically, of course, since hacking medical devices to cause harm is not an actual thing.
Lol, this is about a recall of t:slim X2 Insulin Pumps by the FDA in 2024.