Following on from recent reports that the UK and the US are trialling advanced back-scatter millimetre radar scanners that see through clothing ... comes this story about how school children are defeating security systems to sneak their cell phones into school. See the article below for the basic techniques.
The lesson for those who aren't familiar with security is not what they did, but how they discovered it. Basically, we can guess that the school children tried different measures, discarded those that didn't work, and shared those that did. In other words, a learning attack.
Which, incidentally, we should find quite encouraging, right? After all, that's what school is about.
Getting back to the wider security implications, the question is whether other security systems are secured against attackers who can learn.
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KIDS' SECRET 'CELLS'
By MATTHEW SWEENEY
October 25, 2004 -- Savvy students are figuring out all kinds of ways to get their cellphones past metal-detectors and school-security staff at city high schools, where the devices are banned.
Kids at Martin Luther King Jr. HS on the Upper West Side put the phones behind a belt buckle - and blame the buckle for the beeping metal-detector.
Some girls hide the phones where security guards won't look - in their bras or between their legs.
"You tell them you're wearing an underwire bra," said Gleneshia Jesquith, 17. "What are they going to do, strip us apart for a cellphone?"
"They put the phone in their thighs and they walk in with their legs together through the metal-detector," said Lauree, 16, another MLK student. La Guardia HS, across the street from King, has no metal-detectors, and lets students keep cellphones under what a staffer called an "as long as we don't see it" approach to the city's policy.
"There's a ban, but it's not enforced," said a La Guardia staffer, who declined to give her name.
So La Guardia students keep cellphones off and out of sight, and take advantage of the school's hallway "mood lighting" to make calls from darkened corners.
La Guardia even has an area in the lobby set aside for kids to make emergency calls.
Some approaches don't always work.
"I put my phone in between two pieces of bread and wrapped it in tin foil," said Lauren Nocco, 15, a sophomore at James Madison HS in Brooklyn.
The school took away her phone - and won't give it back until a parent retrieves it.
Mom-and-pop businesses near schools are getting more traffic from the ban.
Madison Deli, near James Madison HS, stores kids' cellphones in labeled paper bags behind the counter while they're in school. When school's out, kids surge into the deli to pick up their phones - and buy drinks and snacks.
The owner, Timothy Thompson, doesn't charge for the phone-storage service - but he does require the kids to bring in their own self-labeled paper bags.
"This is a good school," Thompson said. "They're good kids. Without them, we wouldn't be here."
Posted by iang at November 17, 2004 04:08 AM | TrackBack