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A guy at Def Con in Vegas cloned my work badge in under 2 minutes and it made me rethink physical security
I was at Def Con in Las Vegas 4 months ago walking through the vendor area when a guy with a flipper zero casually waved it near my work badge hanging on my belt. Two minutes later he showed me my own badge credentials on his screen and I just stood there stunned. Everyone talks about firewalls and password managers but nobody at my office ever mentioned that a $200 device can copy your RFID badge from 3 feet away. I went back to work that Monday and asked our security team about it and they basically shrugged it off. So I bought a faraday pouch for $12 on Amazon and now my badge lives in it whenever I'm not actively swiping into a door. The thing is, my company still hands out these same badges to 400 employees and nobody seems to care. Has anyone else dealt with badge cloning at their workplace or am I just being paranoid here?
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kais6720d ago
Did your security team even bother checking if those badges use rolling codes or static ones? I ran into the same thing at a past job where someone copied a coworker's badge with a cheap reader they bought online. What worked for us was getting a few of us together and showing our manager a live demo, because nothing gets a boss moving like watching their own door open from a copied card. We ended up switching to badges with encrypted chips and adding a PIN pad at the server room and badge readers that check in with the system instead of just trusting the card. It took about six months of pushing but the key was making it a group ask instead of one person complaining. Your faraday pouch is a smart quick fix for now, but the real win is getting your company to treat badges like keys instead of free giveaways.
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