BOSTON Barnaby Jack, a celebrated computer hacker who forced bank ATMs to spit out cash and sparked safety improvements in medical devices, died in San Francisco, a week before he was due to make a high-profile presentation at a hacking conference. 
 
 The New Zealand-born Jack, 35, was found dead on Thursday evening by "a loved one" at an apartment in San Francisco's Nob Hill neighborhood, according to a police spokesman. He would not say what caused Jack's death but said police had ruled out foul play. 
 
 The San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office said it was conducting an autopsy, although it could be a month before the cause of death is determined. 
 
 Jack was one of the world's most prominent "white hat" hackers - those who use their technical skills to find security holes before criminals can exploit them. 
 
 His genius was finding bugs in the tiny computers embedded in equipment, such as medical devices and cash machines. He often received standing ovations at conferences for his creativity and showmanship while his research forced equipment makers to fix bugs in their software. 
 
 Jack had planned to demonstrate his techniques to hack into pacemakers and implanted defibrillators at the Black Hat hackers convention in Las Vegas next Thursday. He told Reuters last week that he could kill a man from 30 feet away by attacking an implanted heart device. 
 
 "He was passionate about finding security bugs before the bad guys," said long-time security industry executive Stuart McClure, who gave Jack one of his first jobs and also had worked with him at Intel Inc's McAfee, the computer security company. 
 
 "He was one of those people who was put on this earth to find vulnerabilities that can be exploited in a malicious way to hurt people," McClure said. 
 
 Jack became one of the world's most famous hackers after a 2010 demonstration of "Jackpotting" - getting ATMs to spew out bills. (reut.rs/gIGXVq) A clip of his presentation has been viewed more than 2.6 million times on YouTube. 
 
 Two years ago, Jack turned his attention to medical devices, while working on a team at McAfee that engineered methods for attacking insulin pumps. Their research prompted medical device maker Medtronic Inc to revamp the way it designs its products. (reut.rs/sM9mTE) 
 
 The U.S. government also noticed Jack's work. 
 
 "The work that Barnaby Jack and others have done to highlight some of these vulnerabilities has contributed importantly to progress in the field," said William Maisel, deputy director for science at the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Devices and Radiological Health. 
 
 Jack's passion for hacking sometimes got him into trouble. 
 
 In 2012, he connected his laptop to a gold bullion dispensing machine at a casino in Abu Dhabi, according to fellow hacker Tiffany Strauchs Rad. She said Jack had permission from a hotel manager to hack the machine but security intervened. 
 
 It turned out the hotel did not actually own the gold machine and the American Embassy had to be called in to help resolve the misunderstanding, Rad said. 
 
 "He would hack everything he touched, she said. 
 
 "BELOVED PIRATE" 
 
 Jack's most recent employer, the cyber security consulting firm IOActive Inc, said on its Twitter account: "Lost but never forgotten our beloved pirate, Barnaby Jack has passed." 
 
 Jack had been scheduled to present his research on heart devices at Black Hat on August 1. Last week, Jack told Reuters he had devised a way to hack into a wireless communications system that linked implanted pacemakers and defibrillators with bedside monitors that gather information about their operations. 
 
 "I'm sure there could be lethal consequences," Jack said in a phone interview. 
 
 He declined to name the manufacturer of the device but said he was working with that company to figure out how to prevent malicious attacks on heart patients. 
 
 Jack's sudden death drew responses from the hacking community reminiscent of those that followed the suicide of hacker activist Aaron Swartz in January. 
 
 Dan Kaminsky, a well-known hacker, described the death as a tragedy. "Barnaby was one of the most creative, energetic, diverse researchers in our field," he said. 
 
 "You'll be missed, bro," tweeted another well-known hacker Dino Dai Zovi. 
 
 Jack's sister, Amberleigh Jack, who lives in New Zealand, told Reuters her brother was 35 years old. She declined to comment further, saying she needed time to grieve. 
 
 Black Hat said that it will not replace Jack's session at the conference, saying the hour would be left vacant for conference attendees to commemorate his life and work. 
 
 (Reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing by Tiffany Wu, Vicki Allen and Bill Trott) ||||| Barnaby Jack, a prominent white hat hacker and embedded systems expert with a penchant for pulling off spectacular hacks of devices at conferences globally, has died just days before a scheduled presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. 
 
 Jack most recently was the director of embedded security research at IOActive. He had worked in the security industry for more than a decade, serving in various roles at McAfee, Juniper Networks, eEye digital Security and FoundStone. 
 
 Reached by phone, IOActive's Gunter Ollmann said he was unprepared to speak publicly about the researcher. A message on Twitter from IOActive praised Jack for his research over the last decade. 
 
 [Related: Black Hat 2013: 5 Cool Hacking Tools To Check Out] 
 
 "Lost but never forgotten our beloved pirate, Barnaby Jack has passed. He was a master hacker and dear friend. Here's to you Barnes!," the IOActive message read. 
 
 Jack was scheduled to give a presentation on the security of wireless implantable medical devices at Black Hat 2013. The demonstration was to show how a bedside transmitter could scan and disrupt the processes of implanted heart devices. Reuters reported that the San Francisco Medical Examiner's office confirmed his death in the city Thursday. It did not elaborate on the cause of death. 
 
 The embedded systems expert took the stage at Black Hat in 2010, providing a stunning performance when he exploited weaknesses in widely used models of ATMs, causing them to spit out money on stage at the hacking conference. He also exposed a bogus ATM machine a year earlier at a Las Vegas hotel hosting the DefCon 17 conference. 
 
 Jack later turned his focus to hacking automobile systems and electronic medical devices, showing how small systems and components that run critical processes can be used by an attacker to cause serious damage or death. 
 
 At Hacker Halted conference in Miami in 2011, Jack showed how he could use a transmitter to interrupt medical insulin pumps. The tiny transmitter had a 300-foot radius and could control just about any embedded medical device, Jack said. 
 
 HD Moore, chief research officer at Rapid7 and chief architect of the Metasploit penetration testing framework, said Jack's work had a significant impact, forcing manufacturers to take action. 
 
 "He was one of those rare folks who does a great job with research and working with vendors to get weaknesses fixed," Moore said. "He was willing to go all out on his research the way other folks weren't." 
 
 Joshua Drake, a senior research scientist at Accuvant, said he remembers spending a lot of time with Jack at Black Hat Abu Dhabi in 2010. "He's a really fun-loving guy and liked to have a good time and a really sweet guy all around," Drake said. 
 
 Drake called Jack's research "noble," saying that he chose to go after difficult projects because the outcome could have a major impact on security and safety. Working with embedded systems can be difficult because it's about pulling apart the firmware and digging into closed systems where there isn't much documentation or publicly available source code, Drake said. 
 
 "He realized that medical devices could be an area where he could help improve the situation because people's lives are at stake," Drake said. 
 
 PUBLISHED JULY 26, 2013 ||||| Well-known hacker Barnaby Jack has died in San Francisco, a week before he was due to show off techniques for attacking implanted heart devices that he said could kill a man from 30 feet away. 
 
 The San Francisco Medical Examiner's office said he died in the city on Thursday. It gave no details. 
 
 Jack, a security expert, became one of the most famous hackers on the planet after a 2010 demonstration in which he forced ATMs to spit out cash, dubbed "Jackpotting." 
 
 According to the Black Hat website, Jack was to present Aug. 3-4 on "Hacking Humans." 
 
 "I will discuss how these devices operate and communicate and the security shortcomings of the current protocols. Our internal research software will be revealed that utilizes a common bedside transmitter to scan for, and interrogate individual medical implants," according to promotional material for the event. 
 
 The hacking community expressed shock as the news of his death spread via Twitter early on Friday. 
 
 "Wow ... Speechless," Tweeted mobile phone hacker Tyler Shields. 
 
 Jack's most recent employer, the cyber security consulting firm IOActive Inc, said in a Tweet: "Lost but never forgotten our beloved pirate, Barnaby Jack has passed." 
 
 Jack's genius was finding bugs in the tiny computers that are embedded in equipment such as medical devices and banking machines. He received standing ovations at hacking conventions for his creativity and showmanship. 
 
 "You grimy bastard. I was just talking up about your awesome work last night," Tweeted Dino Dai Zovi, a hacker known for his skill at finding bugs in Apple products. "You'll be missed, bro." 
 
 Friends and fans alike Tweeted memorials to Jack's Twitter handle, @barnaby_jack. 
 
 Dan Kaminsky, an expert in Internet security, Tweeted that he had hoped the news of Jack's death was a prank: "God, the stories. Nobody caused such hilarious trouble like @barnaby_jack." 
 
 While Jack's attacks on ATMs brought him the most attention, his work on medical devices may have a much broader impact. 
 
 Two years ago, while working at McAfee, he engineered methods for attacking insulin pumps that prompted medical device maker Medtronic Inc to bring in outside security firms and revamp the way it designs its products. 
 
 He followed that up with the work on heart devices that he was due to present at Black Hat next week -- his first presentation at the annual convention since 2010. This year's Black Hat conference starts tomorrow in Las Vegas. 
 
 Jack told Reuters in an interview last week that he had devised a way to attack heart patients by hacking into a wireless communications system that links implanted pacemakers and defibrillators with bedside monitors that gather information about their operations. 
 
 "I'm sure there could be lethal consequences," he said. 
 
 Reuters ||||| Security researcher Barnaby Jack on Wednesday showed how easy it can be to trigger a waterfall of cash from a standard bank ATM using readily-available software applications. 
 
 In a presentation at the Black Hat USA 2010 conference in Las Vegas, Jack, director of research at IOActive, a Seattle-based security consulting company, used software to trick two standard ATMs into spitting out wads of cash while displaying "jackpot" on the screens. 
 
 According to a Wednesday report from Venturebeat, Jack was able to hack two ATMs built around the Windows CE operating system and either ARM or XScale processors. 
 
 He did so by using a common universal key and a USB stick to load a rootkit software application, along with another program to take over the ATMs. Jack claims to have hacked at least four different ATM machines, a couple of which have since been patched, VentureBeat said. 
 
 Jack also disclosed a couple of easy countermeasures to his hack, including physical locks with unique keys on the ATMs to stop thieves from easily accessing the machines. Vendors should also use a trusted software environment to prevent software hacks, VentureBeat said. 
 
 In Jack's description of his presentation on the Black Hat 2010 Website, he says he was originally scheduled to give his ATM hacking demo last year, but the talk was pulled at the last minute "due to circumstances beyond my control." 
 
 Jack also notes that most ATM attacks depend on external devices to skim data from customers' ATM cards, or on physically removing the ATMs to steal the cash, and that attacking the ATM software is rare. 
 
 However, Jack noted that this scenario was featured in one of Hollywood's most famous films. 
 
 "I've always liked the scene in Terminator 2 where John Connor walks up to an ATM, interfaces his Atari to the card reader and retrieves cash from the machine. I think I've got that kid beat," he wrote. ||||| (Reuters) - Diebold Nixdorf Inc and NCR Corp, two of the world’s largest ATM makers, have warned that cyber criminals are targeting U.S. cash machines with tools that force them to spit out cash in hacking schemes known as “jackpotting.” 
 
 The two ATM makers did not identify any victims or say how much money had been lost. Jackpotting has been rising worldwide in recent years, though it is unclear how much cash has been stolen because victims and police often do not disclose details. 
 
 The attacks were reported earlier on Saturday by the security news website Krebs on Security, which said they had begun last year in Mexico. 
 
 The companies confirmed to Reuters on Saturday they had sent out the alerts to clients. 
 
 NCR said in a Friday alert that the cases were the first confirmed “jackpotting” losses in the United States. It said its equipment had not been targeted in the recent attacks, but that it was still a concern for the entire ATM industry. 
 
 “This should be treated by all ATM deployers as a call to action to take appropriate steps to protect their ATMs against these forms of attack,” the alert said. 
 
 Diebold Nixdorf said in a separate Friday alert that U.S. authorities had warned the company that hackers were targeting one of its ATM models, known as Opteva, which went out of production several years ago. 
 
 A confidential U.S. Secret Service alert sent to banks said the hackers targeted stand-alone ATMs typically located in pharmacies, big box retailers and drive-thru ATMs, Krebs on Security reported. 
 
 FILE PHOTO: A man types on a computer keyboard in front of the displayed cyber code in this illustration picture taken on March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration/File Photo 
 
 Diebold Nixdorf’s alert described steps that criminals had used to compromise ATMs. They include gaining physical access, replacing the hard drive and using an industrial endoscope to depress an internal button required to reset the device. 
 
 Reuters was unable to obtain a copy of the Secret Service report and an agency representative declined comment. Officials with the Federal Bureau of Investigation could not immediately be reached. 
 
 Russian cyber security firm Group IB has reported that cyber criminals remotely attacked cash machines in more than a dozen countries across Europe in 2016. Similar attacks were also reported that year in Thailand and Taiwan.
– One of the hacking community's biggest names has died in San Francisco, reports Reuters. Barnaby Jack, thought to be in his mid-30s, was known as a "white hat hacker" because he focused on exposing security flaws in banking and medical devices that needed fixing, notes CRN. And he was about to demonstrate his biggest discovery yet—that he could hack into implanted heart devices from afar. "I'm sure there could be lethal consequences," he told Reuters in advance of this weekend's Black Hat convention in Vegas. It's not clear how Jack died. He had previously shown that insulin pumps were vulnerable to hacks, but his most attention-getting stunt occurred at the Vegas convention of 2010 when he caused two ATM machines on stage to spit out cash. He called it "Jackpotting," notes the Chicago Tribune. He worked for Internet security firm IOActive, which tweeted, "Lost but never forgotten our beloved pirate, Barnaby Jack has passed."