With less than $50 of store-bought hardware and some programming, a hacker can gain instantaneous and untraceable access into over four million hotel rooms around the world, according to Cody Brocious, a Mozilla software developer.
He details his findings on his website. The time it takes once installed: around 200 milliseconds.
“With how stupidly simple this is, it wouldn’t surprise me if a thousand other people have found this same vulnerability and sold it to other governments,” said Brocious. “An intern at the NSA could find this in five minutes.”
* * *
“Hotel Key Card” image courtesy of Shutterstock.
Nice video. One correction: the port isn’t actually used for charging at all — the batteries are just standard AAs — but rather is used purely for communication.