Speaker hacker at Black Hat Jack Barnaby died a few days before the conference

It became known that the hacker Jack Barnaby, whose performance on Black Hat was to take place on August 1, where he was going to talk about the remote effects on pacemakers, suddenly died a few days before the conference. The cause of death is unknown, an investigation is underway in San Francisco.

The hacker was able to achieve serious results : his method allowed him to gain access to a cardiac pacemaker, including the ability to apply a lethal charge of 830 volts from his laptop while being 9 meters from the victim. Also, a potential hacker could reprogram the stimulator, putting it into failure after a while. Among other things, the found vulnerability allowed to load a firmware which would infect any devices which appeared in its radius of action.

The hacker spoke about his work at the end of 2012 at the BreakPoint conference, which was held in Melbourne. We must pay tribute to him - Jack did not name the manufacturer of vulnerable pacemakers, and a week ago he said in an interview that he was working with the manufacturer to eliminate the found vulnerability. Earlier, with his research, he forced another company, Medtronic, to attend to the safety of their own products.

Jack was about 35 years old.
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Sources: reuters.com , guardian.co.uk