Device that can unlock any hotel room in the world appears
Just because their friend had a laptop stolen in a hotel, two security experts from F-Secure (Finland) have been searching for answers for the past 15 years and discovered a surprising truth: millions of electronic locks have a fatal flaw.
Tomi Tuominen, a security expert at F-Secure, hypothesized that someone else had hacked the electronic lock to steal his friend's computer. This was consistent with the hotel's logbook, which indicated that only staff could have opened the room.
While the history shows no anomalies, no strangers have unlocked the room. This is what led him and another expert who also works at F-Secure to find the answer, how this hacker was able to exploit the vulnerability in the electronic lock.
Over the years, these two experts unexpectedly discovered an extremely serious vulnerability that allowed the creation of a master key that could unlock any room but left no trace in the database.
The toolkit these two experts use to unlock any room costs only about $300. They estimate that it can unlock about 140,000 hotels around the world, meaning millions of locks can be easily unlocked.
The two experts also shared that this toolkit can find the hotel's master key after only 30 guesses or faster by analyzing data on a previously used key card. However, this process only takes about 1 minute, extremely fast to unlock electronic locks.
F-Secure experts have warned hotels and also confirmed that they will not share the hardware and software devices they used to successfully test the intrusion with any partners.
