[ISN] Videos Show Hackers Refining Hotel Lock Trick That Opens Millions Of Rooms

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/08/28/videos-show-hackers-reproducing-and-refining-hotel-lock-trick-that-opens-millions-of-rooms/

By Andy Greenberg
Security
Forbes.com
8/28/2012

When lock maker Onity first responded last month to news that a hacker’s 
exploit could open millions of its keycard locks installed on hotel room 
doors around the world, it downplayed the attack on its hardware as 
“unreliable, and complex to implement.” It seems the hacker community 
took that statement as a challenge.

In videos posted on YouTube and images passed around online forums, 
curious hackers are already replicating, testing, and refining the 
techniques that 24-year old Mozilla software developer Cody Brocious 
demonstrated at the Black Hat security conference in July.

In his presentation, Brocious showed how he was able to build a small 
tool for less than $50 that can be inserted into the data port on the 
bottom of more than four million Onity locks around the world to open 
them in seconds. But at the time of his talk, a timing issue in 
Brocious’s device meant it only worked in some instances–When I visited 
three hotels with him to test the exploit, he was only able to open a 
door in one of the three.

That issue, Onity may be unhappy to discover, seems to have been ironed 
out. In videos floating around YouTube, hackers plug their own homemade 
versions of Brocious’s device into Onity locks and open them 
immediately.

Here’s one video demonstrating the trick:

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