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Cracking top-rated locks is child’s play: experts

Security specialists on Sunday showed that cracking top-rated locks said to secure the US Pentagon and Britain’s royal family is child’s play.

Marc Tobias was in a sea of hackers practicing lock picking at a DefCon gathering in Las Vegas when he easily opened Medeco’s flagship lock with a paper clip and a key cut from plastic sheets in a Shrinky Dinks toy.

“We think this is a pretty serious threat, and the government guys here we’ve been talking to agree,” Tobias said.

US federal police and defense department officials routinely attend the notorious DefCon hackers gathering in Las Vegas to assess new computer threats and recruit talent to the government’s cyber security teams.

Lock picking is an appealing hobby among DefCon hackers, with a suite dedicated to tutoring, practice and competitions.

Tobias was in a packed “Lock Pick Village” when he detailed how simple it is to open Medeco locks trusted to protect fortunes, national secrets and more.

Tobias has authored books on lock picking and shown how even children can “bump” some high-security Medeco models open by essentially shoving shims in key holes and whacking them.

This newly uncovered crack is said to be troublesome because it involves copying keys.

“If you can make a key it’s over,” Tobias said. “Forget about picking and all that other stuff. There is nothing abstract about making a plastic key for a lock that isn’t yours.”

The trick to making plastic copies of keys is to get hold of a picture or photocopy of an original. One basically uses pictures as templates and cuts out plastic versions of keys.

Meanwhile, a US district judge in Massachusetts issued a temporary restraining order to stop three Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students from doing a presentation at DefCon showing the security flaws in Boston subway’s automated fare system.

The Electronics Frontier Foundation, which is representing MIT students Zack Anderson, Alessandro Chiesa and RJ Ryan, plans to fight the order, the group’s civil liberties director said.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority said in a complaint filed on Friday that the students offered to show others how to use the hacks before giving the transit system a chance to fix the flaws.

But Granick said the students were simply trying to share their research and planned to omit key information on making it easy to hack into the payment system.
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