Today, the Trend Micro Forward-Looking Threat Research team released the paper Leaking Beeps: Unencrypted Pager Messages in the Healthcare Industry, our research about a weakness we identified in pager technology. If you are concerned about keeping your health information private, I would highly recommend you read through it. I, for one, was not expecting the findings we made. Pagers are secure, right? We’ve used them for decades, they are hard to monitor, and that’s why some of our most trusted industries use them, including the healthcare sector.

Nope. Wrong. All it took to see hospital information in clear text from hundreds of miles (or kilometers if you are a non-US person like me) away is an SDR software and a USB dongle. Frankly, I was stunned. The problem with pagers—like many other technologies—is that they were designed and developed in a bygone era, and very few people go back to see if current technologies easily break the trust we had in these older ones or not (by virtue of making ease of monitoring—accidental or intentional—something easily done by a common person).