hi, (this might be a really stupid question, but) have you ever seen these gadgets in movies with what looks like a plastic card with the magnetic strip on the back (think credit card or hotel key) connected by a IDE looking cable to a box with several 7 segment numerioc displays (like a calculators #'s) did i explain that good? they are in many spy movies and such. are these hollywood props or can these really be made? i am a really honest person (i swear!) and i wouldn't be using these for fraud or burglary, i just think it would be cool to make and have one. if anyone doesn't know what i am talking baout, i will try to find a picture or will upload a mspaint.exe doodle of it. and if this is just a hollywood prop, please ignore the stupid person here
For anyone who has no idea... Watch Terminator 2: The scene where John and the ginger are at the cash machine with the atari Portfolio, or the scene in the Cyberdyne building at the key safe... or, Enemy Of the State, the bit where they get into the hotel room
My mum uses one of those to get into work... she works for the government. But it's nowhere near as cool as you would think, she's a doctor working at the local Breastscreen clinic (so Queensland Health, so goverment, so all the bells and whistles, and crappy computer networks ). A quick google found http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=367 with some electronics knowlege (which were nowhere near short of here ) you should be able to hack up something with cables and lights and stuff.
if you mean a swip card cracker, i've forgotten the term for them, they ain't used much ne more. i can't remeber the read timings for swipe card data, but its slow, so brute force cracking combonations is a bit time consuming. However they do excist, and aren't that hard to make.
I think he is talking about a movie prop that is supposedly used to hack card readers. It looks like a magnetic card connected with a ribbon cable to a box with lights on it. I am quite sure that they are just movie props. It would be quite hard or impossible to build one because the magnetic card is a passive device and it has no interface to the card reader other that the reader looks at the data on the card. The closest thing is a device to reprogram the cards (they have these at hotels so they can quickly make a card that is programed for a certain room). Other than reprogramming the card, there is nothing else that i can think of.
In hotels the locks use programable cards, but they change in a pseudorandom sequence. It looks like a random sequence, but the way it is derrived is known to the lock and the computer. At a certain "seed number" the code for the lock is always the same. So the computer keeps track of the rooms, and programs the cards, when the people swipe the card for the first time, the lock will start rejecting the old code, and only accept the new one, or the one after that. Making it impossible for a person to rent a room, read the card, make their own, and rob the room later. It is a rather interesting and suprisingly secure system.
Actually, my brother did something of the sort, kinda of a input outpu device.. he got a card reader from a long time bud, read last sentence It really didnt work well, but your definetly going to need a reader/write, with software. Heres a site that I googled : http://www.idt-net.com/ and if you want to get fimiliar with the reader: http://www.hpmuseum.org/journals/65crd.htm . I know lots about this because I knew the man who cracked the starbucks prepaid coffee card code. Was a buddy of my brothers, kinda rubbed off on me. Obiviously too dangerous to try tho edit : This is all incriminating evidence, the reader and per. so watch what you do
It's almost certainly impossible. Kinda like those lame movies where some super hacker can somehow break encryption, or where they just hammer the keyboard while some graphics appear on screen. I suppose the idea with this device is that it simply tries every combination of pin number until it finds the right one. Most ATMs only give you two or three tries to get the right number before swallowing your card. Most ATMs pull the card deep inside the machine anyway so your ribbon cable would have to be very, very long and survive being shut in a metal shutter designed to prevent very, very long ribbon cables entering the machine. As for door locks, most only allow a certain number of attempts to open them per second. Even if it's something like three attempts per second, an 8 digit code could take over a year to break by brute force. Most probably use much longer codes, and it could be difficult to stand by the door with your laptop for that long. Random movie trivia: The code scrolling up the Terminators HUD in the first movie is 650x machine code, also used on the Commodore 64.
You should always have an open mind, it was back in the early ninties i was reading some of my dads security reports about people using the LPT port to get root privs via a bug in the kernel. Its just trying to show a brute cracker (which did work with most security systems in use by stupid people in the early nintines, a very common company who i won't name here for obvious reasons had this design flaw) where by a brute crack could be done in a few minuites. Ok it wasn't done via a card (direct interface to the serial bus) but one of them showed u the numbers it was cracking (well some of the most sig. digits). So they have excisted, thou negation or sliding wheel methods don't work with this. (or ones with basic common sense, a delay of 1second per check stops most brutes).
whoa, thats the movie that got me thinking about these there must be a master code, is there a way to find that? or disable the time delay between trys?
