Cyber Hitman of the Future?

The July 2008 edition of PC Magazine has a short story on page 92 titled "Hacked Through the Heart" which references a paper published at secure-medicine.org discussing the possibility of hacking the human body through wireless reprogrammable Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) such as pacemakers.  These attacks could lead to effects such as changing the settings on the pacemaker or even disabling it entirely!  The paper also goes into detail as to how some of these attacks would take place.

Although the paper mentions that as of right now these are theoretical scenarios, the more important point to remember is that these IMDs are driven by software and "where there is software, there are vulnerabilities" and "where there are vulnerabilities, there will be exploits."  I could easily envision a scenario where this creates a Cyber Hitman of the Future where hits are carried out in such a way that they would be virtually untraceable and if executed correctly could have an elapsed time effect where the full damage of the attack may not materialize for days, weeks, or even months after it initially occurred.

On a lighter note, this certainly gives new meaning to the term "Insider Threat" (I'm funny on a Friday :) )