ITGH welcomes Fredrik Heiding as Chief Technology Officer and Director of our new research stream on Cybersecurity and Health.
In 2022, Fredrik received media attention for hacking the King of Sweden and the Swedish European Commissioner (with consent). He has published numerous research papers from his investigations into ethical hacking in research communities and vulnerability assessments. He created a penetration testing methodology for IoT and later applied the methodology to test the security of smart devices commonly found in connected cities, which led to finding vulnerabilities including persistent backdoors - hidden information channels that leak data collected by the device - and poor security protocols. His current research analyzes Darknet marketplaces to find malware targeting the most common IoT devices from US Smart Cities, as well as how to automate his previous hacks, phishing, and spearphishing attacks, using GPT-4.
Fredrik will use his methodologies and findings from his previous investigations to direct new research focused on cyberattacks in the healthcare ecosystem, which is on the rise and is both financially costly and devastating to human suffering and our lives. He is based at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.