Opening a locked hotel room with a box of cream cheese
RFID chips will soon be everywhere. These are the frightening "implanted chips" of the future, except that they don’t need to be implanted. They will be embedded in every product that you use, tracking your every move.
RFID chips have very bad security and can easily be hacked:
"James Van Bokkelen is about to be robbed. A wealthy software entrepreneur, Van Bokkelen will be the latest victim of some punk with a laptop. But this won’t be an email scam or bank account hack. A skinny 23-year-old named Jonathan Westhues plans to use a cheap, homemade USB device to swipe the office key out of Van Bokkelen’s back pocket."
Another hacker uses a prank to open his locked hotel room with a box of cream cheese:
" ‘I was at a hotel that used smartcards, so I copied one and put the data into my computer,’ Grunwald says. ‘Then I used RFDump to upload the room key card data to the price chip on a box of cream cheese from the Future Store. And I opened my hotel room with the cream cheese!’"
But the uses of cracking into RFID chips go far beyond pranks:
Aside from pranks, vandalism, and thievery, Grunwald has recently discovered another use for RFID chips: espionage. He programmed RFDump with the ability to place cookies on RFID tags the same way Web sites put cookies on browsers to track returning customers. With this, a stalker could, say, place a cookie on his target’s E-ZPass, then return to it a few days later to see which toll plazas the car had crossed (and when). Private citizens and the government could likewise place cookies on library books to monitor who’s checking them out.
Related posts:
I hate the surveillance society
Comment by jr — July 3, 2006 @ 2:16 am