Jay Radcliffe
The diabetic researcher who hacked his own insulin pump and got manufacturers to pay attention.
Jay Radcliffe has type 1 diabetes, which gives him a more personal stake in medical device security than most researchers. At Black Hat 2011 he showed how wireless commands to his own insulin pump could be sniffed and forged, because the link had neither encryption nor authentication.
In 2016, by then at Rapid7, he reported similar flaws in the Animas OneTouch Ping pump. Johnson & Johnson wrote to more than a hundred thousand patients – the first time a manufacturer had warned users directly about a cyber vulnerability in a medical device. Radcliffe was careful to stress that the risk was low and that patients should keep using the pump; getting that message across without scaring people off their treatment was half the job.