A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 410

Note
An interesting white paper by a security analyst, Hagai Bar-El,
entitled “Known Attacks Against Smart Cards,” is at

www.discretex.com .

As smart cards grow in popularity, various consumer defenses have entered
the market. One of the most widely advertised is a wallet made of stainless steel
threads, which blocks remote access to smart cards by shielding them.
A very common use for smart cards among the U.S. defense community is for
accessing secure buildings and sometimes secure devices. An article by John Ley-
den on January 13, 2012, posted in Security states that the Chinese government
has attempted to use the Sykipot Trojan to compromise and gain data from U.S.
military smart cards.
Not only are smart cards and smart passports vulnerable to deliberate attacks,
but they are also vulnerable to old-fashioned bugs or defects. In 2009, the late mil-
lennium bug affected the smart cards of about 30 million German citizens. A pro-
gramming error caused the software in bank ATMs and credit card processors to
stop working when the calendar changed from 2009 to 2010. German consumers
could not use credit cards or withdraw funds from ATMs until the bug was re-
paired.
More than 70 million U.S. passports have been issued with smart card chips.
More than 100 million credit cards in Europe are now smart cards. Because China
uses smart cards for passports and credit, too, the global total of smart cards is
probably passing one billion.
The bad news is that smart card usage seems to be expanding much faster than
smart card defenses. This is a very serious future threat, with the greatest potential
for harm aimed at affluent citizens with numerous credit cards who travel interna-
tionally.

Spam
It is unfortunate that the name of a commercial meat product has come to be used
for an annoying kind of disinformation that can be rapidly distributed by email and
instant messaging. In a computer context, the word “spam” refers to ads, emails,
and pop-up screens that are sent to millions of computer users on a daily basis.
(The term “spam” may have derived from a Monty Python sketch in which every
dish in a restaurant contained the Spam meat product marketed by Hormel.)