It appears that electronic product codes (EPC) are exposing private business to the outside world as products with EPCs are trucked around the country (see Hacking Truckers).
That means your competitor could use this information for intelligence purposes. "He could get an idea of what you are shipping and how much, and how often," Perrymon says, adding that an attacker could also write to those tags, either disabling or changing them if you don't apply the proper authorization and passwords to your EPC system. That's PacketFocus's next step in its research.
And sniffing the truck's payload could also provide criminals with intelligence they wouldn't otherwise be able to get very easily, thus helping them target their holdups or other heists, he says. "Unless they had a lot of inside information, they don't have enough information to rob that truck. Now they can scan it if it's not secure — they don't want to rob that toilet paper truck, but if it's got plasma TVs with surround sound, [that's their] target."
According to the article, it's easy to examine a truck's content without too much fuss. Just walk around a truck stop's parking lot with some homemade equipment and you can sniff out the best cargo to swipe. Here are some more things to think about:
- Can terrorists use this in any way? Of course they can. Right now the potential is there for property theft to fund their terrorist ways. However, EPC technology is also used in all retail arenas. This includes food retail, which means that trucks with food could potentially be compromised before reaching the stores. How would anybody know food supplies were systematically poisoned while in transit?
- Is there an upside to this technology for law enforcement? I see a huge advantage that will probably not be used until it past necessary. Each EPC is unique. Prosecutors could use a database of stolen retail items to prove without a doubt that particular items did indeed "fall off the truck". However, this would require some serious cooperation between law enforcement and the retail industry. I could see EPC technology used to study how organized crime networks steal and distribute goods and shut them down ala Numb3rs.
- Can this be abused by "The Man"? Oh yes. This is one of those technologies that is simply happening and consumers have no say, input, or any idea how pervasive this technology is. EPC tags can be in product packaging or directly on a product. As a result, a future household could have dozens of live EPC tags transmitting in their homes. The potential for serious abuse is there. How many consumers are really going to take the time to examine every product they buy for EPC tags and disable them, even if they know how? Consumers could be the biggest losers because of this technology. The history of technology has shown how greedy individuals ruin the playground for everybody else. In the same way that spam affects everybody and it's perpetrated by only a few of the millions of companies on the Internet, EPC technology could be abused by a few but hurt everyone.
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