[ISN] Hackers Crack Hotel Room Locks With A Tool Disguised As A Dry Erase Marker

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/10/02/hackers-crack-hotel-room-locks-with-a-tool-disguised-as-a-dry-erase-marker/

By Andy Greenberg
Forbes Staff
Forbes.com
10/02/2012

The security researchers who spend their days breaking into clients’ 
systems to find and fix security vulnerabilities often call themselves 
“penetration testers,” or “pentesters.” But one group of hotel lock 
hackers just gave the term “pentest” a very different meaning.

A trio of hackers have built a tool that appears to be an innocent dry 
erase marker, but when inserted into the port on the bottom of a common 
form of hotel room keycard lock triggers the lock’s open mechanism in a 
fraction of a second.

“I guess we wanted to show that this sort of attack can happen with a 
very small, concealable device,” says Matthew Jakubowski, one of the 
three hotel lock hackers and a security researcher with the consultancy 
Trustwave. “Someone using this could be searched and even then it 
wouldn’t be obvious that this isn’t just a pen.”

Here’s a video Jakubowski posted to the company’s blog. 
http://blog.spiderlabs.com/2012/10/pentesting-hotels-with-pens.html

[...]


--
Get your CEH, CISSP or ISSMP with ExpandingSecurity.com Live OnLine classes that will not wreck your schedule.
Come to a free class and see how good our program really is. Free weekly PainPill:
http://www.expandingsecurity.com/PainPill