Hotel keycards can be easily hacked in 200 milliseconds

With less than $50 of store-bought hardware and some programming, a hacker can gain instantaneous and untraceable access into over four million hotel rooms around the world, according to Cody Brocious, a Mozilla software developer. He details his findings on his website. The time it takes once installed: around 200 milliseconds. “With how stupidly simple this is, it wouldn’t surprise me if a thousand other people have found this same vulnerability and sold it to other governments,” said Brocious. “An intern at the NSA could find this in five minutes.” * * * “Hotel Key Card” image courtesy of Shutterstock.
Nice video. One correction: the port isn’t actually used for charging at all — the batteries are just standard AAs — but rather is used purely for communication.