Hacker takes control of hotel’s high-tech rooms
A San Francisco-based cyber security expert claims he has hacked and taken control of hundreds of highly automated rooms at a five-star hotel in China.
The South China Morning Post reported that Jesus Molina was staying at the St Regis Shenzhen, which provides guests with an iPad and digital “butler” app to control features of the room including the thermostat, lights and television.
Molina tested the system’s security by writing a piece of code to confuse the guest iPad so he could control the room from his laptop.
After three room changes, he discovered that the network addresses of each room and the devices within them were sequential, allowing him to write a script to potentially control every one of the hotel’s more than 250 rooms.
“Hotels are particularly bad when it comes to security,” Molina told SCMP.”[They’re] using all this new technology, which I think is great, but the problem is that the security architecture and security problems are way different than for residential buildings.”
Ian Jarrett
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