The study represents a multi-year look at how medical equipment manufacturers and their customers, such as hospitals, have made public information about device recalls or other equipment issues in the three major databases established or used by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The study, co-published by six researchers associated with Harvard Medical School's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, casts grave doubt on how well the U.S. is tracking security and privacy issues in software used to operate medical devices.

Meanwhile, the study notes, medical devices are known to be increasingly compromised by malware, even turning them into botnets.

Medical devices used in hospitals are "doing good things for people," says Kevin Fu, associate professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, one of the study's co-authors. Patients shouldn't panic or become afraid. But he said the researchers undertook the study, which in part is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, because incidents in hospitals related to malware are known to be occurring.

The three major medical-device recall and safety-alert databases used in the U.S. are where medical and IT professionals would expect to find publicly searchable information on security they want, "but what bothered us the most is the databases don't appear to capture security and privacy issues." He adds, "It's probably fair to say they weren't designed to do that."