Adventures of the hotel room hacker
A little hacking on the road :
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A vulnerability in many hotel television infrared systems can allow a hacker to obtain guests' names and their room numbers from the billing system.
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Laurie found that the backend systems in many hotels around the world don't have password protection or other authentication schemes to prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to them through the TV. And they fail to use encryption to protect data as it's transferred and stored.
The only hardware an intruder needs is a laptop running Linux, an infrared transmitter and a USB TV tuner. Laurie said the attack can also be performed using the infrared port built into many laptops.
Plugging the TV into the tuner, which is the size of a laptop power pack, and the tuner into his laptop, Laurie is able to use his laptop to pick up content through hotel TVs that the backend system is broadcasting but not currently displaying on the TV.
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Laurie first discovered the vulnerability when he was "mucking about with hotel TVs to get the porn channel without paying for it." He was able to bypass TV billing menus by using his laptop to tune in to the premium content being broadcast from backend systems. He didn't have to pay for the content, because the systems didn't know he was watching it.
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Then he wrote a script that spit out codes to a TV to see what happened. Within an hour and a half, he had a list of codes that controlled things such as billing for the minibar and the room-cleaning status reports -- a menu maids use to report when they've finished cleaning a room. Laurie could alter the reports with little effort.
In some hotels, the front desk can lock and unlock the minibar remotely, or maids can do it using a remote and an infrared receiver on the front of the bar. Laurie found he could do it, too. One day at a Holiday Inn, he accidentally locked the minibar while he was trying to find the commands that controlled it.
"Unfortunately, I did it before I got that beer out!" he said, pointing to a slide showing a can of suds taunting him through the minibar's glass door. "That was motivation to find the other half of that code (to open it)."
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