White Hats and Lab Coats

How do communities of Citizen Scientists and DIYBio advocates react during a global pandemic crisis like COVID19? Thomas Landrain, founder of the first distributed, open innovation labratory Just One Giant Lab (jogl.io), joins the podcast to discuss progress on diagnostics and therapies, as well as how to help these efforts.

What do medical professionals understand about how medical device firmware works? What about patients? And how do you talk to them about device hacking? Nastassia and Scott of medical device maker Becton Dickinson walk us through how a manufacturer responds to a product cybersecurity incident, including what they want medical professionals and affected patients to understand before, during, and after the crisis has been resolved. 

When systems fail, hackers are among the first to figure out how to rework the system. But what happens when that system is the entirety of modern medicine? Biohacker Mixael Laufer, who created the EpiPencil and has shown the world how to homebrew medication, talks about living on the bleeding edge of citizen science.

Joel Cardella, Director of Product Security at Thermo Fisher Scientific, walks Beau and Nina through his company's device inventory process, which included mapping out the cybersecurity strengths and weaknesses of its product line, and figuring out how to get hospitals to apply to security patches in a timely manner.

Security researcher Vee Schmitt, who has found vulnerabilities in the very pacemaker model she uses to stay alive, talks about how her investigations into her pacemaker's security flaws took her all the way from her home in South Africa to the FDA's doorstep, and how concerned consumers need to be with cybersecurity vulnerabilities in their medical devices.

Welcome to White Hats and Lab Coats, the official podcast of the Biohacking Village! In this short episode, Beau and Nina talk with cybersecurity reporter Seth Rosenblatt of The Parallax about what biohacking means, why it's such a compelling and complex field, and how come it's time for the Village to take to the airwaves.