Old game machine gets hack trick. Two security researchers show attendees at the Defcon hacking conference how to reuse Dreamcast gaming consoles as stealthy network monitoring devices.
Higbee and his programming partner, consultant Chris Davis of RedSiren Technologies, created the software to turn a Dreamcast into a network bug. Their software, when burned onto a CD-R and placed in a Dreamcast that has a broadband network adapter, allows the game console to give a hacker access to the network to which it is connected.
Rather than teaching hackers in the audience how to monitor others' networks, Higbee and Davis said the demonstration was intended to alert network administrators to the danger that many innocent-looking devices could pose to network security.
"We are really attacking the concept of what computers are," he said, adding that many other devices could be used to monitor networks, including TiVo television recording devices, some new "intelligent" vending machines and even printers.
Walking into a company and dropping a device onto the network is a simple way to defeat much of the network security that businesses might erect to keep out attackers, Higbee said.
"Physical access is pretty easy to obtain," he said. "Especially for short moments of time."
[CNET News.com]
This is something I've been teaching people all along. Physical access is the first step for security. I know a case in which a hard disk was replaced, by bad guys, by a broken hard disk, the next day the user just thought his hard disk went south, call the sys admins they got his machine running threw away the broken hard disk and they never found out how the information in the original hard disk was stolen!
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