Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
You know those expensive, high tech, secure e-passports that governments the world over tell us will prevent identity theft, stop terrorists in their tracks and all because they are fake proof? Turns out they can be successfully cloned in a matter of minutes...
The Times of
London reports today how it managed to successfully clone a fake proof
e-passport, turning a baby into Osama bin Laden in the process.
The newspaper got Jeroen van Berk from the
University of Amsterdam, and a renowned security expert, to use his own
software to read, clone and alter the microchip data from a secure e-passport. Hi did so while ensuring that the passport would still be
accepted as the genuine article at most airport border controls.
All van Berk required to fake the passports were a couple of RFID chips
which cost UKP £10, and a UKP £40 card reader, in addition to his own
software that is.
He changed the chip from one passport belonging to a 36 month old baby
boy into one with an image of Osama bin Laden instead. van Berk also
changed a 36 year woman into the Palestinian suicide bomber Hiba
Darghmeh.
It makes a mockery of UK government claims recently that such passports
cannot be faked. An argument put into play when 3000 blank e-passports were stolen in July.
The Times verified that the fake passports were readable using the
standard Golden Reader software in place at most airports and approved
by the International Civil Aviation Organisation. It passed them as the
genuine article, and revealed no signs of tampering.
Which is odd, because the UK government has also argued loud and clear
that any faked chips would immediately be spotted as such because their
key-codes would show up as a mis-match and alert the person doing the
reading.
Unfortunately, The Times reports, only 10 of the 45 countries with
e-passports have a Public Key Directory system at all, and only
five of them are actually using it!
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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