06/03/20 RFID viruses, eh! Not so fast, say experts

We were pretty sure that security types would respond fairly quickly with plugs to any security holes that RFID might have, but it appears the reports of RFID virus vulnerability we heard the other day might have been a bit exaggerated. It seems RFID experts have looked over the claims of the study, and they say the findings could be rather flawed due to the weak systems the original student researchers tested their virus up against. They also made it clear that fixed data RFID tags could not be corrupted, and that RFID systems have technology in place to safeguard the rest of the system, including the rejection of suspect data. We can't quite keep up with all the jargon, but it does seem the coming apocalypse won't be nearly as thrilling as previously suggested.

RFID chips can spread viruses

While most of the protests about the spread of RFID technology have been related to privacy and related issues, here's a new issue to worry about: viruses. Dutch researchers implanted a virus in an RFID chip, and then used it to demonstrate that an infected chip could potentially spread a virus to a database server as it's being scanned. In theory, this could lead to compromised data in everything from supermarket product inventories to terrorist watchlists, resulting in mispriced ice cream and global chaos. We anticipate that security experts will respond quickly and install safeguards to protect databases -- except in the supermarket, where they're expected to allow tampering so that they can continue getting cheap ice cream.