Britain's
expensive high-tech biometric passport system has been hacked. Lukas
Grunwald, a consultant with a German security company, claims to have discovered
a method for cloning the information stored in the new passports. Speaking to
the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas, Grunswald said that data can be
transferred onto blank chips, which could then be implanted in fake passports.
It has cost the UK more than £415m to load passports with information such as
fingerprints, facial scans and iris patterns. Apparently the same hack can be
used to turn over the UK government's plan for a national ID card. Grunwald was
able to hack the card in two weeks using hardware worth £105.
