Credit Card Companies Gagged Mythbusters Over RFID Vulnerabilities?

from the security-through-obscurity...-and-legal-threats dept

It's amazing to watch just how sensitive some companies are concerning the rather well-known security vulnerabilities associated with RFID tags and smart cards. We've seen time and time again, companies try to suppress such research from getting published -- and every single time, those efforts to suppress the publication of the vulnerabilities backfires, often badly.

But that never seems to stop companies from flexing their legal muscles.

The latest example comes to use via the Consumerist blog, who dug out a clip of Adam Savage from the TV show Mythbusters talking about what happened when the show tried to do an episode on RFID vulnerabilities:

Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else... They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it.

Check out the video of him saying this (while admitting he's probably not supposed to talk about it) here: Perhaps it's an exaggeration by Savage, but do the credit card companies really think that security through obscurity (with a healthy dose of legal threats) is the best way to protect their customers?

Filed Under: adam savage, gagged, mythbusters, rfid, smart cards, vulnerabilities