Displaying items by tag: QRC

As with many technologies there is a blind spot during the initial design and testing phase that happens. With SCADA devices this was the possibility that anyone would put them on the internet. These control devices were not built to be exposed like this and because the people that were using them did not follow best practices for protecting them we all know just how vulnerable our core infrastructure is. Even with devices like pacemakers that can be tuned using WiFi there was the failure of imagination that left them open to… well any one to connect to them. This failure of imagination seems to exist in almost any product as the designer continue to say, “no one will think of that”. Today we are seeing this happening to Google and their Google Glass project. It looks like they never thought someone would use QR Codes to infect the device.

It looks like there is a simple hack, containing of only one line of code that can start an unstoppable factory reset on the Samsung Galaxy S3. According to security researchers there is a simple USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) code that can do some serious harm to S3 owners. USSD is a session based GSM protocol unlike SMS and MMS, and it is used to send messages between a mobile phone and an application server. With the advancements in technology there are more than few services based on USSD, some of them are social networking apps, mobile banking, prepaid recharge/account balance, even the NFC technology and QR codes.