Hacking a passport or anything that has a chip in it is pretty easy if you’re Major Malfunction. In the third episode of MotherBoard’s “Can I Hack It?”, made possible by Mr. Robot on Amazon Prime, Adam Laurie aka Major Malfunction showed them how easy it is t hack a passport or credit card.
Meet Mr. Laurie
Mr. Laurie is a White Hat researcher who tests the security of products by seeking the ways to hack them. He is specialized in hacking devices that use radio frequency identification (RFID). Besides, he is the director of a UK-based security firm Aperture Labs Ltd. and also runs the London chapter of the Defcon hacking community.
“I like silly puns. Also, I’m coming at this from an idiot’s point of view: I know nothing about RFID tags, and even less about python. As such, I felt a complete idiot when I started,” Mr. Laurie writes in the FAQ section of his coded RFIDIOt (RFID IO tools) collection of libraries and tools. This code was published under the GNU GPL and could be used to explore RFID technology.
Easier done than said
While talking with MotherBoard, he explained how easy it is to pull data from a contactless card or clone a passport using available equipment. He also demonstrated by smoothly cloning the passport and the credit card of the host Victoria Turk.
