Researchers Crack Medeco High-Security Locks With Plastic Keys. By Kim Zetter
According to a group of security researchers speaking at the DefCon hacker conference Friday in Las Vegas, Medeco high-security locks take Visa, too. As well as MasterCard, American Express and Discover cards. To be more precise, the researchers say that plastic used in all of these credit cards can be easily fashioned into simulated keys that open three kinds of M3 high-security locks made by the Virginia-based Medeco Security Locks company -- locks that are used to secure sensitive facilities in places such as the White House, the Pentagon, embassies and other buildings. "Virtually all conventional pin-tumbler locks are vulnerable to this method of attack, and frankly nobody has really considered it or looked at it before," says Marc Weber Tobias, one of the researchers. The researchers showed Threat Level how they could create the simulated keys from plastic simply by scanning or photographing a Medeco key, printing the image onto a label and placing the label onto a credit card or other plastic to cut out the key with an X-Acto blade or scissors and then use the key to open a lock covertly. Any credit card plastic will do to create a simulated key, as will Shrinky Dinks plastic, which comes in sheets that can be run through a printer. For the digital picture of the original key to work, the image has to be to scale. http://tinyurl.com/59ynq6 _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
