Dr Mark Gasson "infected" himself with a computer virus | Hacker News Reader

Dr Mark Gasson "infected" himself with a computer virus

reading.ac.uk

10 pointscosmohh12 comments

A sensationalist write up for PR purposes. It's just a common RFID tag, much like the kind we use for pets.

The fact that this guy implanted it under his own skin is inconsequential.

Sure, the way he does it is sensationalist, but I still like his concept of infecting RFID system by just "carrying" around a malicious RFID tag.

He's a colleague of Kevin Warwick, someone who a former tutor of mine described as "a buffoon with a good line in hoodwinking the media into thinking that what he is doing is cutting-edge science". (http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2000/09/38467?cu...)

Inconsequential to us, but I guarantee I'll be hearing about it from my mother.

Was the first thing I got sent this morning.

You've got to be pretty stupid to do this :

    S: any RFIDs around with code for me to execute
    C: sure, here's some 0x1fab214bab3421baeb3f2d287d20d8297d2
    S: Thank yo ... Connection reset by peer

Don't run this, just put it in a .txt file and run a virus scanner on it:

  X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

OK, it's actually harmless, but it's the only pure-ASCII executable I've ever seen, which is pretty cool.

I think http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/asm/eicar/eicarcom.html is a better link for that

Interesting read but

> That it be a normal DOS program capable of producing the same results under WINDOWS as well as real DOS mode.

so it's pretty useless to me

I'm not so sure about that. All you need is a bit of buffer overrun, reflection, or poor escaping mechanisms - and none of those are exactly rare.

Here's a 2006 article on RFID+buffer overflow tat wikipedia pointed me at: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/03/6386.ars

Bollocks brought to you by the University behind: http://blog.jgc.org/2006/12/midas-number-or-why-divide-by-ze...

Also covered here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1379909

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1379834

Reply on news.ycombinator.com