Infrared Mischief

Scott Pinzon gives some insights into security issues that he picked up at Adam Lauri's Black Hat Training class.

The first write-up was based on Wireless-LAN and firewall issues.

The second about the fun you can have with Infrared brought a smile to my face, remembering back to the days of those IR programmable Casio watches - back then most people just used them to annoy people watching TV, making it spookily switch off or change channel.

Lauri explained how someone that knows what they're doing, sitting in a hotel room, can use IR to;
- Shift all the billing for mini-bar and pay-per-view movies from his room, to another guest's room
- Set the system so no one at the hotel can receive any TV except pornographic channels
- Wake up the entire hotel at 4:30 a.m. by making every room's television turn on
- Spy on other hotel guests' Internet activities when they use the television's cable connection to access the Web or send e-mails
- Find the names of all guests staying at a hotel and learn what they viewed, ate, where they called, and how long they stayed

For the full post, see I just made you pay my mini-bar bill (and I was really thirsty).