Enlarge (credit: US Food and Drug Administration)

Pacemakers are devices that are implanted in the chest or abdomen to control life-threatening heartbeat abnormalities. Once they're in place, doctors use radio signals to adjust the pacemakers so that additional major surgeries aren't required. A study recently found that pacemakers from the four major manufacturers contain security weaknesses that make it possible for the devices to be stopped or adjusted in ways that could have dire effects on patients.

Chief among the concerns: radio frequency-enabled pacemaker programmers don't authenticate themselves to the implanted cardiac devices, making it possible for someone to remotely tamper with them.

"Any pacemaker programmer can reprogram any pacemaker from the same manufacturer," researchers from medical device security consultancy WhiteScope wrote in a summary of their findings. "This shows one of the areas where patient care influenced cybersecurity posture."

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Early in March, President Donald Trump surrendered his personal Android phone—the phone from which scores of controversial Twitter posts had been launched. Based on Twitter metadata, Trump retired the Android device after expressing outrage over the DNC's failure to let the FBI search its servers and taunting Arnold Schwarzenegger on March 5. The next day, he replaced it with an iPhone.

According to a report from Axios' Mike Allen, Twitter is the only application running on Trump's new iPhone. And on his current overseas trip, staff have tried to limit his screen time in order to reduce the volume of his 140-character missives, Allen wrote:

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In the wake of this spring's Senate ruling nixing FCC privacy regulations imposed on ISPs, you may be (even more) worried about how your data is used, misused, and abused. There have been a lot of opinions on this topic since, ranging from "the sky is falling" to "move along, citizen, nothing to see here." The fact is, ISPs tend to be pretty unscrupulous, sometimes even ruthless, about how they gather and use their customers' data. You may not be sure how it's a problem if your ISP gives advertisers more info to serve ads you'd like to see—but what about when your ISP literally edits your HTTP traffic, inserting more ads and possibly breaking webpages?

With a Congress that has demonstrated its lack of interest in protecting you from your ISP, and ISPs that have repeatedly demonstrated a "whatever-we-can-get-away-with" attitude toward customers' data privacy and integrity, it may be time to look into how to get your data out from under your ISP's prying eyes and grubby fingers intact. To do that, you'll need a VPN.

The scope of the problem (and of the solution)

Before you can fix this problem, you need to understand it. That means knowing what your ISP can (and cannot) detect (and modify) in your traffic. HTTPS traffic is already relatively secure—or, at least, its content is. Your ISP can't actually read the encrypted traffic that goes between you and an HTTPS website (at least, they can't unless they convince you to install a MITM certificate, like Lenovo did to unsuspecting users of its consumer laptops in 2015). However, ISPs do know that you visited that website, when you visited it, how long you stayed there, and how much data went back and forth.