Elvis is alive and well, thanks to a hacked passport

[presley31]

Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis is sitting in seat 9B on flight 41!
An enterprising pair of hackers have recently come clean about a hack-slash-prank undertaken at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport way back in September 2008. In a nutshell: The pair created a phony passport using the name and image of Elvis Presley and hacked the passport's biometric chip with corresponding information. They then used the passport at a self-serve passport scanner to gain access to the secure part of the airport.
Elvis' name and image were linked to fake information embedded on the chip -- and, a key point, the passport chip was coded to be issued from a non-existent country. How is that possible? The passport scanner accepted the document because each country has a different standard for the way such information is stored on the passport, and not all countries share that information with the rest of the world.
The result is a hodgepodge of standards with little coordination among the world's nations -- and the scanner used in the hack did nothing more than check to see if the information on the biometric chip matched that printed in the passport.
The good news: The scanner in question was only part of a test program, and it seems that it's not going to be put into use in the real world. But the duo do raise some serious questions not just about the safety of biometric passports but about whether we're being foolish to rely too much on technology in this case. There's a certain psychology that "if the computer says it's OK," we tend to go along with that. As one of the hackers states in the linked interview, the technology is so half-baked that "I think they've actually made the borders weaker, not stronger."
Additional concerns have been raised in recent years about how RFID-enabled passports might be able to be copied by nearby hackers using scanner hardware, making the possibility of surreptitious passport cloning a real concern. Some have even advocated that the recipients of the new model passports smash them with a hammer to disable the chip component altogether.
That's good advice straight from Elvis. Thank you very much.
(News, Source;SanjaM/ElvisInfoNetwork)

source: http://www.elvisinfonet.com/

[mislulu]

Good Read Jen !! Yes I believe we do trust technology way to much !!