Will RF Hacking Get Worse Before Better?

Well, you can shield your house, but if it really gets that bad maybe it's time to consider the alternative to electronic checking.

Once upon a time we paid our bills by dropping a check in a stamped envelop and putting that envelope in a metallic box along our roadside. I still pay most of my bills that way and much to everyone's surprise - it works!

Now, I can't control the entity's security that I am sending my check to, but this is a limit to my reach that I just have to accept.

As a society we did pretty well paying our bills and securing our earnings without RF signals. It's still possible to do that today, so any real threat is more of a threat to connivence and not so much to imminent personal bankruptcy.

The worst case scenario is identity theft. However, you can mitigate that with any number of agencies that offer to keep a watchful eye on your accounts at a small cost.

Credit card and bank fraud can be managed by watching your own accounts. Any suspicious activity is really the bank's responsibility, so if you do acquire a loss, the bank will fix it. The worst is waiting for a new card to arrive in that metal box by the road.

The point is, we can minimize our exposure by simply being mindful of where we keep our crown jewels. There are certain types of data that I simply do not keep on electronic devices.

Is it really necessary to carry all your life's critical data on your mobile phone where it is easily lost? That seems foolish and totally unnecessary to me.

We can either try to create an impregnable fortress around our whole lives or simply keep the valuables in a small safe. The latter scenario is by far the cheaper alternative at a small cost of convenience.

the reasoning we will paying our bills online is a lot other of other forms.

Convenience and cost effective. We eliminate the personal effect that someone will actually open our bill and enter it.

**WARNING** This is going off topic.

What I don't understand is, ATM fees. this automation should save money where we don't have fees. Initially ATM didn't have fees. (Some establishments such as Kwik Trip (convenence Store/Gas Stations) and Community Credit Unions does not charge these fees, and will reimburse you for them.

ATMs cost money to buy and operate. You are always going to pay for this either at the ATM or as part of your banking services or both.

Part of those fees are simply because they can charge them and people accept it because it is "convenient".

I use ATMs about 4 times a year. However, I do most of my grocery shopping, gas, other local purchases using a bank card, which cost merchants money.

Ultimately, we still pay those merchant fees in the end product, but we don't see them as an itemized cost of doing business any more than we see merchants itemizing the cost of electricity to run their businesses.

I could go back to paying cash, but my biggest gripe is all the coin change that tends to accumulate in one's pockets. So, the convenience of bank cards trumps the risks of security, which is mostly mitigated by the banks. However, as you unwittingly pointed out, we still pay the cost of that operation as the end user.

As far as ATM, the cost are still there, the difference is, such as Kwik Trip (Which is Regional being Upper Midwest), theirs are hidden, and the charges are passed on, yet, they are still competitive, if not cheaper that other national brand convenient store/Gas Stations. such as Shell, BP. I know they are very well run, Kwik Trip.)

I did notice that their competitors have notice and Shell is now has free (Cost are hidden, but passed on) ATM's.

When you say Bank Card, if you mean debit, I try to avoid that, just due to the security against being stolen or fraud. But I do use my Credit Card, because of the small percentage rebates. Which does add up to a nice some at the end of the year.

So is this to mean spread spectrum and other methods of making your individual transceiver signals personal are no longer effective? Next they will be picking off the string stretched between two cans.

Short of quantum encryption, everything is subject to hacking and eavesdropping.

Although amazing from a technical standpoint, it is depressing.

Welcome to the age old invention of the two-edged sword.

Unredundant is right, spread spectrum is (virtually) unhackable, and so is 256-bit encryption on top of linux or unix. Which is not to say totally unbreakable, but so difficult as to be not worth the computing power.....when there is easier targets.

Message content can be encrypted as much or as little as you like, but the communications protocols aren't (and can't be, for obvious reasons) and these can used by someone to weasel their way into your machine. Once there the intruder can commandeer various parts of the OS, which aren't encrypted either (again, for obvious reasons). *Nix operating systems have a much better track record on security issues than other popular OSes, but the recent OpenSSL debacle shows that Linux has its vulnerabilities, as well.

When you say 'spread spectrum', there are all kinds of ways of doing spread-spectrum communications, some more secure than others. The most secure forms of SSC are indistinguishable from background noise. The basic idea is that, if you don't know the signal is even there, chances are pretty good you're not going to hack it.