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Can Airborne Viruses Infect RFID Tags?

Written by Evan Schuman
June 1st, 2009

A Microsoft engineer is being quoted as questioning the safety of RFID tags and whether the tags could be wirelessly attacked. “Technically speaking, if a virus broadcasts itself utilizing a wireless data transfer protocol and another system accepts this transmission and transfers control to the received data, then we may have a case of an ‘airborne’ infection,” said Oleg Petrovsky, senior software development engineer at Microsoft, according to a report in Secure Computing. (Microsoft promised to comment, but didn’t respond by deadline.)

“The most plausible case scenario might include a virus that utilizes a vulnerability in the driver of a wireless device or a service using either TCP/IP or Bluetooth protocols. However, despite the growing numbers of wireless devices, including smartphones, PDAs and 2G, 2.5G, 3G and GPRM network services, so far we’ve been fortunate to not have outbreaks of this nature.”

Posted in Mobile/Wireless/Contactless, RFID, Security/Fraud
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