Security quotes of the week

On the other hand, increasingly difficult CAPTCHA practices can drive humans crazy. "Which pictures do NOT contain traffic signs?" "Confirm this statement, 'there are no images or partial images of automobiles in this set of pictures.'"

Humans may justifiably want to throw their computers through the nearest window when poorly executed CAPTCHAs prevent them from legitimately accessing online services.

With a $300 Proxmark RFID card reading and writing tool, any expired keycard pulled from the trash of a target hotel, and a set of cryptographic tricks developed over close to 15 years of on-and-off analysis of the codes Vingcard electronically writes to its keycards, they found a method to vastly narrow down a hotel's possible master key code. They can use that handheld Proxmark device to cycle through all the remaining possible codes on any lock at the hotel, identify the correct one in about 20 tries, and then write that master code to a card that gives the hacker free reign to roam any room in the building. The whole process takes about a minute.

Samsung Smart TV. During the first minute after power-on, the TV talks to Google Play, Double Click, Netflix, FandangoNOW, Spotify, CBS, MSNBC, NFL, Deezer, and Facebook—even though we did not sign in or create accounts with any of them.