2 Nov
2007
2 Nov
'07
2:10 p.m.
Hi Jim,
I used to do residential and vehicle security installations for a few
years around 20 years back... as for the Club... they are pretty much
unbreakable, except for the cheapo knock-offs... the car thieves cut
through the steering wheel, no the Club and then slid the club off of
the steering wheels to either steal the car or just steal the airbags
which were usually worth more then the car itself many times... New
thing these days, thieves are stealing the krypton headlights out of
cars as they are worth a pretty penny...
Curt
Jim Leonard wrote:
Curt @ Atari Museum wrote:
The real key to implementing this is that the
keyfob code has to be
manually entered by requiring mouse over clicks across a number bar
on the screen, not typing it into a text box, otherwise a fake site
could grab the login info, relay it into paypal via a script and then
process and run an automated script once logged in to transfer/remove
funds.
(Disclaimer: I used to work in the security industry)
(Disclaimer2: I am not ranting against Curt, just trying to dispel
some myths and paranoia before they start)
If someone is willing to target you so specifically, I don't think a
"manual" method of entry is going to make a difference. Setting up
that level of phishing is so much work that, I am not making this up,
it is easier to just visit your house with a gun and extort the cash
from you. Seriously. There were stories in my industry of someone
coming up with a new protection method for an ATM or something (like a
way to prevent people from spying on the keypad, or requiring
double-entry where the second entry had reversed number positions on
the screen) and, I kid you not, it wasn't worth the mafia's effort to
try to crack it -- instead, they showed up at the engineer's office
with a picture of his family and asked him, "nicely", to reveal how it
worked.
You'd have to be some millionaire classic computer collector to
attract that kind of attention. A keyfob is so much trouble to
scammers and phishers that they don't even bother, they just move to
the millions of others who don't use one.
And the "but people steal cars locked with The Club too!" argument
doesn't work here -- The Club is a placebo. Any hacksaw can get
through it in 45 seconds. The keyfob has a six-digit number seeded
specifically for you and changes once a minute and the period is
something crazy, like 2^19337 before it repeats. Our bones will turn
to dust long before the number is guessable :-)
Bottom line: Don't fear the keyfob. It's a no-brainer for $6.