If you go to a hotel with keycard locks make sure to run your fingers under the keycard lock outside your door. If you find a DC power port there, take note: With a few hacker tricks and a handful of cheap hardware, that tiny round hole might offer access to your room just as completely as your keycard. Scary right? Well a hacker has proven that this is truly the case.
At the Black Hat security conference Tuesday evening, a Mozilla software developer and 24-year old security researcher named Cody Brocious plans to present a pair of vulnerabilities he?s discovered in hotel room locks from the manufacturer Onity, whose devices are installed on the doors of between four and five million hotel rooms around the world according to the company?s figures. Using an open-source hardware gadget Brocious built for less than $50, he can insert a plug into that DC port and sometimes, albeit unreliably, open the lock in a matter of seconds. ?I plug it in, power it up, and the lock opens,? he says simply.
Think about that for a moment, in seconds someone could break into your hotel room. Granted you have to be very smart to create such a device but if he teaches to others it can be very dangerous also now what will happen with all of these locks? Wil hotels laugh at this and pay no attention or will the hotels decide to change their lock. I am sure they will not, looking at the cost of changing all locks in say a 500 room hotel vs. a slim chance that someone could hack the door locks. Plus the insurance will cover the break in and costs much less then changing the locks. Most likely a few hundred breakins would need to occur before they make the change.