ripperdoc's clinic

Now, part of this hack has been disputed elsewhere, but still - hijacking a plane with an Android and remote controlling it!

In a presentation at the BreakPoint security conference in Melbourne, IOActive researcher Barnaby Jack described an attack on pacemakers that could, he says, deliver lethal shocks to their owners. Jack claims that an unspecified pacemaker vendor’s devices have a secret wireless back-door that can be activated by knowledgeable attackers from up to 30 feet away, and that this facility can be used to kill the victim right away, or to reprogram pacemakers to broadcast malicious firmware updates as their owners move around, which cause them to also spread the firmware, until they fail at a later time.

Hacking a smartphone using NFC makes hacking start look like magic (“I can take over your phone just by touching it”).

Charlie Miller, a security researcher at Accuvant and serial smartphone hacker, demonstrated how easy it is for hackers to exploit near-field communication technology to take control of devices remotely. In front of a packed audience, he successfully hacked three smartphones using N.F.C.: a Samsung Nexus S, a Galaxy Nexus and a Nokia N9. In each case, he was able to access photos, send texts, browse the Internet and even make phone calls from the phones, without laying a finger on them.

Car hacking is starting to emerge…

A disgruntled former employee of Texas Auto Center chose a creative way to get back at the Austin-based dealership: He hacked into the company’s computers and remotely activated the vehicle-immobilization system, which triggered the horn and disabled the ignition system in more than 100 of the vehicles. The dealership had installed the system in their cars as a way to deal with customers who fell behind on their payments.

Suddenly, Hollywood style hacking doesn’t seem so  silly anymore:

It assumes that you have access to a suspended/screen-locked computer whose disk is encrypted. You access the machine over its FireWire interface (or, if it doesn’t have FireWire, you plug a FireWire card into one of its slots, and the machine will automatically fetch, install and configure the drivers, even if it’s asleep), and then use the FireWire drivers to directly access system memory, and from there, patch the password-checking routine and walk straight into the computer.

• In third place was ”TooTall Nate,” with a hack that lets you an AR Drone over a cellular networks with a Verizon MiFi card, resulting in unlimited range as long as you’ve got a decent cell connection.
• Second place went to a team of freshmen from Stanford, who figured out a way to control lots of different drones with just one computer. They’ll be putting it up on Github, just search for “multidrone.”
• And in first place was James Halliday, who wrote a virus that will infect an AR Drone, and then use that drone to infect any other AR Drones it comes across, “causing them all to be p0wned and run amok.” Or if you want to be less evil about it, it’s a handy way to automatically deploy software onto a bunch of AR Drones at once. It’s available on Github under “virus-copter.”

Every time Charlie Stross touches a keyboard, pure genius is puked through the intertubes (well, his books are good but not that great, it’s his blog that’s a must-read).

Inspired by ideas of having flying Piratebay servers, he suggested putting a small computer inside a power splitter and insert it into walls of shops and public areas all around town. Most of these will have WiFi, some open, some closed. These plugs could essentially create a whispernet where you are nearly untraceable, and which is cheap to create. Any traffic can be routed through these, or it can provide encrypted communication for hackers on the go (within the radius).

Worst case is, someone finds it and you lost a $50 investment…

As Bruce Schneier says, a great movie plot (but perhaps not so real) threat. And very good inspiration. The idea is - banks use GPS to have an accurate global time signal. GPS signals can be spoofed or blocked by specially built tranceivers. One could make a fortune if used correctly, or disrupt the economy. Especially when everything is automated within microseconds.