Features
Gigs & Bytes: Hollywood Hacking
According to The New York Times, three employees of Flexilis, a rather new hi-tech company specializing in applications utilizing Bluetooth WiFi technology, stood on the sidelines as Hollywood’s elite made their way down the red carpet and into the Kodak Theatre. Their mission? To determine if anyone’s smart phones were vulnerable to hackers.
To do this, one of the Flexilis three carried a backpack containing a laptop, scanning software and an antenna. The results? Flexilis estimates anywhere between 50 and 100 cell phones were vulnerable to a hack attack.
Flexilis was quick to point out it merely scanned for possible problems, and did not actually attempt to illegally hack anyone’s cell phone.
The problem with smart phones is features such as appointment book, e-mail and calendars often rely on central computers to store the information. Intercept the password being transmitted from the phone to the service and you’re in like Flynn, while the user often ends up embarrassed like Paris.
What might be scarier than the possibility that 50 to 100 cell phones could have been hacked at the Oscars is that no one noticed the Flexilis employees as they scanned the celebs outside the Kodak.
“We were only doing this passively, but it was possible that someone could have been standing right next to us doing this maliciously,” one of Flexilis’ founders, John Hering, told The Times.
But there’s something far, far scarier out there: the latest celebrity sexcapade caught on tape and distributed on the Web. It stars none other than Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst.
You see, everyone knows it’s Fred in the video, mainly because he picked an opportune (or permit us to say “op-porn-tune”) moment to turn the camera around and focus it on his “O” face.
However, unlike the previous week when hackers apparently broke into Hilton’s online T-Mobile Sidekick II account and siphoned off her address book along with a few “revealing” photographs of the woman famously known for being famous, it appears that Durst’s video appeared on the Net via more conventional means: It was stolen.
At first there was speculation Durst’s video was obtained in pretty much the same fashion as Hilton’s files. It made sense, especially because the phrase “T-Mobile Terrorist” appears on the film. However, T-Mobile officials were quick to point out that the Sidekick doesn’t handle video.
Besides, Durst told MTV he doesn’t use T-Mobile and he suspects someone repairing his computer must have found the clip.
“If you wanna know how not secure you are, just take a look around,” Durst told MTV. “Nothing’s secure. Nothing’s safe. It’s just helping us get better, causing awareness for homeland security.”
Meanwhile, those who have seen Durst’s two minute quickie of a quickie have only one thing to say to Fred’s latest creative endeavor: Don’t quit your day job.