Researcher Wows Black Hat With NFC-based Smartphone Hacking Demo

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 26, 2012 @11:00AM from the unsafe-at-any-speed dept.

alphadogg writes "At the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas Wednesday, Accuvant Labs researcher Charlie Miller showed how he figured out a way to break into both the Google/Samsung Nexus S and Nokia N9 by means of the Near Field Communication (NFC) capability in the smartphones. NFC is still new but it's starting to become adopted for use in smartphone-based purchasing in particular. The experimentation that Miller did, which he demonstrated at the event, showed it's possible to set up NFC-based radio communication to share content with the smartphones to play tricks, such as writing an exploit to crash phones and even in certain circumstances read files on the phone and more."

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Re:Hmm by jader3rd · 2012-07-26 11:51 · Score: 5, Insightful

why aren't they as secure as they possibly can be short of not existing?
Because first to market wins.
Re:Hmm by socceroos · 2012-07-26 12:58 · Score: 5, Insightful

That's what people said about RFID tags until people started skimming them at distances beyond a kilometre.