Airport control fail (again)
Monday, May 28, 2012 at 10:28PM I and perhaps the rest on the IT Security industry look at the security theatre when traveling and it is something of an amusement. Taking nail files off old lady, Making injured people walk without crutches, forced to take off shoes in in the USA. It is all very very stupid.
The sad thing is that the front line staff have become so drummed into finding nail files, and scissors they can't see the real threats. As a IT security professional I travel with an assortment of unusual items to perform penetration testing, and when required for physical/social engineering jobs this includes lock picks, Access card cloning tools etc. (At AusCERT we ran a social engineering tutorial and as part of that we had a hands on class for proximity card cloning as well as lock picking to illustrate points as part of the class).
Recently due to a last minute change at the airport when coming back from AusCERT I had to carry on a bag that I had not planned too.
So when I got to security and I had to remove my laptop, I looked down and thought this is not going to go well. As my bag went through the xray machine this is a sample of some of the lock pick gear they would have seen in it.



The funny part is that they asked me if I had a nail file in there. I opened my bag ready to explain the reason behind these items. Well they picked out one item that resembled a nail file put it in it's own tray put it though the metal detector and the thought of loosing my nail file collection (aka the "toool" credit card size lock pick kit) was not pleasant but better than loosing everything.

They then said yep that was it and promptly gave it back to my honest shock.
You just can't make up theatre this good.
Chris Gatford | Comments Off | 

