Dark Reading had another great article recently on the “7 Coolest Hacks of 2011”.  This was by Kelly Jackson Higgins.

The article was, of course, interesting – and a little alarming.  Here they are:

1.  Remotely starting a car via text message

2.  Powering down a power plant, literally

3.  Mini hacker time travels – 10 year old was getting bored with her favorite mobile gaming app, so she came up with a neat trick to switch the time on her device to make it more challenging

4.  Insulin pumps go rogue – either turning off or delivering a lethal dose of insulin

5. Warflying – hacking in mid air  – pair of researchers built a radio-controlled model airplane with an on board computer and 4G connectivity that could be used as a hacking “drone” to wage aerial attacks on targets that are basically unreachable on land

6. When laptop batteries turn against you – embedded controllers on laptop batteries are hackable

7, Hot “Diggity” hack – Fran Brown and Rob Ragan, researchers for Stach & Liu, wrote a series of tools called Diggity that speed up the process of detecting security vulnerabilities via Google or Bing searches. The goal is for enterprises to find those bugs — SQL injection, cross-site scripting, etc. — in their servers before attackers do.

You can read the full article here:  http://www.darkreading.com/advanced-threats/167901091/security/attacks-breaches/232301041/the-7-coolest-hacks-of-2011.html?pgno=1

Nancy Sykora
Sr. Account Executive