Researchers Crack Medeco High-Security Locks With Plastic Keys

Life takes Visa, says the credit card company’s catchy and ubiquitous TV ads. And now, according to a group of security researchers speaking at the DefCon hacker conference Friday in Las Vegas, Medeco high-security locks take Visa, too. As well as MasterCard, American Express and Discover cards. To be more precise, the researchers say that plastic used in all of these credit cards can be easily fashioned into simulated keys that open three kinds of M3 high-security locks made by the Virginia-based Medeco Security Locks company — locks that are used to secure sensitive facilities in places such as the White House, the Pentagon, embassies and other buildings. Virtually all conventional pin-tumbler locks are vulnerable to this method of attack, and frankly nobody has really considered it or looked at it before, says Marc Weber Tobias, one of the researchers