Hacking Passports and Credit Cards with Major Malfunction

Anything with a chip in it is vulnerable to attack. Your contactless credit card, your office key card, your passport—as more processes become automated, more opportunities open up to hackers.

In the third episode of Can I Hack It?, made possible by Mr Robot on Amazon Prime, we visit Adam Laurie, better known by his hacker name Major Malfunction.

Laurie specialises in hacking devices that use RFID, or radio frequency identification. He’s a white hat researcher who finds ways to hack into products in order to test their security, and he also runs the London chapter of the Defcon hacking community.

From his home in the British countryside, Laurie tells us how hacking has changed over the decades and demonstrates just how easy it is to pull information from a contactless card or clone a passport—but he promises he’s deleted the details he hacked from us.