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Hackers Found a Way to Open Any of 3 Million Hotel Keycard Locks in Seconds

In Consumer Alerts, Vulnerabilities
March 21, 2024
Hackers Found a Way to Open Any of 3 Million Hotel Keycard Locks in Seconds
Image: Hotel keycard stock photo/Freepik.com

“Two quick taps and we open the door”

This may give you second thoughts about any hotel you stay in, or at least what brand of keycard door lock they use for hotel rooms. Andy Greenberg of WIRED reports:

When thousands of security researchers descend on Las Vegas every August for what’s come to be known as “hacker summer camp,” the back-to-back Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences, it’s a given that some of them will experiment with hacking the infrastructure of Vegas itself, the city’s elaborate array of casino and hospitality technology. But at one private event in 2022, a select group of researchers were actually invited to hack a Vegas hotel room, competing in a suite crowded with their laptops and cans of Red Bull to find digital vulnerabilities in every one of the room’s gadgets, from its TV to its bedside VoIP phone.

One team of hackers spent those days focused on the lock on the room’s door, perhaps its most sensitive piece of technology of all. Now, more than a year and a half later, they’re finally bringing to light the results of that work: a technique they discovered that would allow an intruder to open any of millions of hotel rooms worldwide in seconds, with just two taps.

Read more at WIRED.