Hackers Build a Hotel Master Key

You know how sometimes you’re running late on a business trip and are tempted to leave your valuables barely hidden in your hotel room while you’re at a meeting? Don’t.

It turns out that your room can be unlocked by a hacker with mad skills and a rigged master key. The white hats over at F-Secure dug up (after thousands of hours of testing) a vulnerability in the locking system software used by VingCard, the leader in hotel-room locks, securing rooms in millions of hotel doors worldwide.

This isn’t the first hospitality hack. A year ago, hackers forced a 5-star hotel in Austria to hand over Bitcoin after they released ransomware that locked hundreds of guests out of their rooms. Talk about a bummer of a vacay.