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According to the San Franciso Chronicle:
The private firm in charge of security at San Francisco International Airport cheated to pass tests aimed at ensuring it could stop terrorists from smuggling weapons onto flights, a former employee contends.
All security systems require trusted people: people that must be trusted in order for the security to work. If the trusted people turn out not to be trustworthy, security fails.
A high-school student used a hardware keystroke logger—the undetectable kind that sits between the keyboard and the computer—to steal exams in order to sell them.
Officials said the 16-year-old boy hooked up a keystroke decoder to a teacher’s computer and downloaded exams in November.
From Adam Fields weblog:
Some guy tore apart his PS2 controller, connected it to the parallel port on his computer, and wrote a script to press a large number of button combinations. He used it to figure out all of the cheat codes for GTA San Andreas (including some not released by Rockstar, apparently).
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/17/1411251
This is a great example of a “class break” in systems security—the creation of a tool means that this same technique can be easily used on all games, and game developers can no longer rely (if they did before) on the codes being secret because it’s hard to try them all.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.