Hackers steal German govt data

Germany has downplayed the significance of an attack made by hackers extracting personal data from the government's ID cards, reports The Register.

The biometric ID cards store a scan of a user's fingerprints along with a six-digit PIN that can be used to digitally sign official forms.

Hackers from the Chaos Computer Club, however, were able to use home scanners that work with the cards to extract personal information including the fingerprint scan and PIN from a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip embedded in the cards.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is questioning Contra Costa officials over its implementation of a microchip tracking programme in its preschool centres, states California Watch.

Nicole Ozer, the ACLU's technology and civil liberties director, says: “While school officials and parents may have been sold on these tags as a cost-saving measure, we are concerned that the real price of insecure RFID technology is the privacy and safety of small children.”

Contra Costa's computerised child-tracking initiative is called Child Location, Observation and Utilisation Data System (Clouds). In July 2009, county officials started talking with AT&T and Dynamic Computer Corporation about using a portion of a $1.1 million stimulus grant from the US Department of Health and Human Services to build such a system.

American Security Logistics (ASL) has rolled out an RFID tracking device that will track the location and movement of cargo pallet shipments by sending data across AT&T's wireless network, says Trading Markets.com.

ASL has equipped the new Airdex Visi-pallet with a wirelessly connected tracking device manufactured by GlobalSat and distributed by US BioSensors.

"This light-weight, wirelessly connected pallet is a very cost effective alternative for the many industries in need of a tracking solution to monitor valuables in transport," says Glenn Lurie, president of emerging devices, AT&T.