They're still alive after electrocution?
Electrocute = electric + execute:
verb: To kill by electric shock.
Hackers electrocute selves in quest to turn secure doors inside out
Not every demo at security cons goes off without a hitch: Badass hackers Ryan and Jeremy electrocuted themselves when building what could have been the first device capable of wirelessly exploiting door-opening push buttons. The pair demonstrated the trial and terror process of building the box at the Kiwicon hacking event in …
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Monday 21st November 2016 08:33 GMT daemonoid
Re: They're still alive after electrocution?
Back in the late 19th century you would've been right. As ever though, language moves on and those of us who play with electricity occasionally get electrocuted with little more ill effects than spontaneous expletives.
(OED is in agreement - injure or kill by electric shock)
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Tuesday 22nd November 2016 13:45 GMT Antron Argaiv
Re: They're still alive after electrocution?
The technical term is "zapped".
I speak as a practicing EE. It can refer to you (to be avoided) or a circuit (hey, it happens), or, in this case, both.
It sounds to me like these two bozos know just enough about electricity to be a danger to themselves.
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Monday 21st November 2016 15:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: They're still alive after electrocution?
The OED is irrelevant as a reference and far from being the arbiter of correct usage that people think it is because it's merely a record of common usage, not the definer of it. Try Cambridge, Collins, Mirriam-Webster and you'll get a different definition.
But then "got a bit of a jolt from" doesn't sell newspapers.
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Monday 21st November 2016 11:09 GMT Ralph B
Re: They're still alive after electrocution?
> but why do .exe's keep living?
On the contrary, I think you'll find that .exe died in 2000.
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Tuesday 22nd November 2016 08:09 GMT GruntyMcPugh
Re: They're still alive after electrocution?
Sorry Symon, but 'decimate' is misused. There is no appeal to popular use, because it explicitly states the figure. Imagine this, you ask your grocer for four apples, and he gives you three. He says in popular usage Four means Three. Do you accept that? Nope, things with numbers are absolute.
But then we have 'Ultimate' which merely means the latest in a succession, 'chronic' which means re-occuring over time, not very bad, things that people quite simply get wrong.
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Monday 21st November 2016 12:25 GMT DainB
Re: "then increased the amount of electrons running through their prototype."
"they increased the speed of the electrons (current)"
They did WHAT ?
1 Ampere is the flow of electric charge across a surface at the rate of 1 Coulomb per 1 second.
1 Coulomb is equivalent to the charge of approximately 6.242×10^18 protons.
To increase current to 2 A you need 2 Coulombs per second, which means you need double amount of protons. To fit all those protons you need thicker wire, not longer.
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Monday 21st November 2016 13:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "then increased the amount of electrons running through their prototype."
SI units expressed as abbreviations can be and are capitalized. In fact, they MUST be capitalized if named for a person. The Coulomb (C) is named for Charles-Augustin de Coulomb. Same for the (James) Watt (W), (William Lord) Kelvin (K), (André-Marie) Ampère (A), and (Alessandro) Volt(a) (V), among others.
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Monday 21st November 2016 14:09 GMT Julian Bradfield
Re: "then increased the amount of electrons running through their prototype."
Wrong. The abbreviation is capitalized; the full unit name is not. From the SI Brochure:
Unit names are normally printed in roman (upright) type, and they are treated like ordinary nouns. In English, the names of units start with a lower-case letter (even when the symbol for the unit begins with a capital letter), except at the beginning of a sentence or in capitalized material such as a title. In keeping with this rule, the correct spelling of the name of the unit with the symbol °C is "degree Celsius" (the unit degree begins with a lower-case d and the modifier Celsius begins with an upper-case C because it is a proper name).
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Monday 21st November 2016 13:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "Others interested in the field could leverage their work,"
The word "USE" doesnt demonstrate out of the box bluesky thinking. Obviously.
To succeed on the world of business you need to synergise your ability to not only look like a twat but sound like one as well.
Using bourgeoise simple English doesnt make you stand out during the scrum during or following a two week sprint.
You often need to stand out as a developing talent to maximise your growth potential.
Isn't it obvious?
Now you can move forward and help your team improve the deliverable to generate the desired result plus or minus 10% of the actual deliverable regardless of time or budget constraints.
Management speak...the closest thing white people have to Hip Hop.
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Monday 21st November 2016 13:28 GMT eldakka
Re: "Others interested in the field could leverage their work,"
The way I'd use USE vs LEVERAGE is in how modified the resultant product/process is.
If I USEed it, then it's basically a copy, with little or no modification from the original.
If I LEVERAGED their work, then I'd be using it as the basis or as useful input into a significantly modified version.
Disclaimer: NFI if it is dictionary correct, but it is how I'd use it and what I'd take it to mean.
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Monday 21st November 2016 13:37 GMT Tom 7
Re: No need for the open button
A place I worked in had those electromagnetic doors and swipe cards fitted. First day I just walked through four of them on the way to the computer room as they decided not to put them in the same place as the old doors and I walked through them in the dark of an early morning start. Once the boss had recovered from the shock of finding me in the computer room and giving me a swipe card for the doors I tried crashing them again. Didn't seem to work so I guess ignorance is bliss.
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Monday 21st November 2016 14:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
One of the companies that I work with has these touch to exit buttons on their doors, we found by accident that a handheld radio transmitting 5W on 430 mhz usually opened the doors within 3 seconds of keying up (from about 4 feet away), when it failed to open the doors the sensor was stuck in a locked state where it would no longer respond to touch until it was powered off and on again.
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Monday 21st November 2016 15:19 GMT Velv
Push The Button To Exit
Which is one of the reasons good security doors require you to authenticate every time you open the door no matter which way you are transiting.
Even more securely some of them will have mechanisms to attempt to ensure only one person can transit at a time, although not being the svelte athlete I once was I have fallen foul of one suggesting there were two people inside :(
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Monday 21st November 2016 17:15 GMT Charles 9
Re: Push The Button To Exit
What if there's a fire? Under most fire codes, any obvious egress must be allowed to open easily from the inside, even without power, in the event a fire knocks out the power (this is due to the panic inherent in a fire; people swarm to the nearest exit regardless of its purpose). Probably why the locks are electromagnetic (active, meaning they only hold while power is applied).
I'd like to know how a high-security compound meshes with the fire code.
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Monday 21st November 2016 19:30 GMT Kernel
Re: Push The Button To Exit
"I'd like to know how a high-security compound meshes with the fire code."
In the most obvious way possible - all the buildings I've worked in that require swipe to exit, or even just pushing a button to exit, automatically release the door magnets when the fire alarms are activated.
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Monday 21st November 2016 20:21 GMT Cameron Colley
Re: Push The Button To Exit
Fire? "Break glass to exit" buttons were used a place I used to work -- not sure whether they were alarmed or not as I only saw then used during the first fire drills after they were fitted, to ensure they worked as expected. Either that of you have fire buttons or just "normal" fire exit doors anyhow which are alarmed. The type of exit being used depending upon the type of security layers the building has (Secure office only, secure lobby only, secure compound...).
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Tuesday 22nd November 2016 15:17 GMT Charles 9
Re: Push The Button To Exit
"In the most obvious way possible - all the buildings I've worked in that require swipe to exit, or even just pushing a button to exit, automatically release the door magnets when the fire alarms are activated."
What I'm wondering is how they safeguard against someone sneaking in through these doors DURING a fire, hiding, and then rummaging in the chaos (because we can't rule out someone committing arson in order to commit high-class espionage).
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Tuesday 22nd November 2016 21:03 GMT ChrisBedford
Re: Push The Button To Exit
What I'm wondering is how they safeguard against someone sneaking in through these doors DURING a fire, hiding
Huh? With a human guard of some type stationed at said door?
Security sections aren't all complete idiots. I know the average rent-a-cop walking around with an ill-fitting uniform is a minimum-wage, minimum-IQ drone, but any company worth anything meaningful has somebody with a bit of brains in charge of the loss control department.
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Tuesday 22nd November 2016 12:32 GMT A K Stiles
Re: Push The Button To Exit
Used to work in a building like that - rotating doors with single person sized vestibules that would turn just enough to allow one person through after a successful swipe from either side (it turned in opposite directions depending which side was swiped), and a general kicking if you didn't have matching ins and outs on the daily audit. If you tried to tailgate someone, you'd get stuck in the enclosed vestibule area, and it wasn't possible to transit the other side of the door - don't remember quite how it worked but we did consider it in detail at the time.
Right next to the rotating door was a large hinged door (glass) that was always locked, except when the fire alarm went off, when it would automatically release so everyone could just flood out quickly. took over 15 minutes to get everyone back in to the building through the rotating door once the alarm was over.
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Tuesday 22nd November 2016 20:59 GMT ChrisBedford
Re: Push The Button To Exit
rotating doors with single person sized vestibules that would turn just enough to allow one person through
Unbelievably annoying to try getting through this type of door (let's just call it what it is: a turnstile) with anything larger than a Tupperware lunchbox in your hand. Totally forget a substantial toolbox. Cue up the just as annoying bureaucratic process of getting clearance to bypass the turnstile and use the large (fire escape) door, after security has overridden the alarm, blah blah blah yawn...
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Monday 21st November 2016 16:22 GMT rob_leady
There's always an easy way in...
At a former workplace, we had fun one day, when the card reader controlling access to the computer room decided it wasn't going to work anymore.
Fortunately, whoever installed the door control system mounted the box that controlled everything outside the computer room. Once I'd figured out which of the connector blocks went to off to the door exit button, it took a couple of seconds with a paper clip to get the door open.
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Monday 21st November 2016 20:54 GMT Stevie
Bah!
Why do you need a computer to run a HV coil "at different frequencies"? Wouldn't a Bakelite knob do the job?
I don't suppose anyone noticed that any radio, like the sort carried by security guards, would likely be fizzing and crackling and giving the game away as their hunchback threw the third switch?
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Tuesday 22nd November 2016 07:26 GMT jimdandy
A big hammer would have done the job on those doors without so much fuss.
And as far as "electrocution" goes, an average human body can deal with a few milliamps of relatively low voltage without death occurring. Jack the voltage up enough and you'll get the "skin" effect where the current will not pass through the blood vessels and nerves, but across the skin/surface as it will then have less resistance than the internal body parts. Doesn't mean you won't get horrific burns, but at 35kv I've known a few workers who only needed a few weeks and some plastic surgery to return to work. They usually chose a slightly different assignment. And of course, some others didn't do so well.
If the current exceeds 200-300 milliamps (across the body and through the heart), most people will die quickly due to cardiac arrest. At higher amperage, most of the ones whose internals are cooked don't last very long afterwards.
I'd go back to using the big hammer.
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Tuesday 22nd November 2016 21:07 GMT ChrisBedford
They seem to have no idea wtf they are doing
I think it's more like the person who wrote the article had no idea wtf they [the hackers] were doing, and wrote a dumbed-down version of the story as s/he understood it. Resulting in making the whole thing incomprehensible, but it's hardly the first news article I've read that is guilty of that.
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Tuesday 22nd November 2016 22:51 GMT Kevin McMurtrie
Missing flyback cap?
I wonder if they remembered to bypass the flyback transformer driver with a small amount of capacitance. That captures flyback from nearby inductance and feeds it back into the flyback transformer a moment later. Without it, the driver sees nearly infinite voltage and arcs or avalanches (semiconductor version of arcing over). The EM pulse from that will kill pretty much any nearby semiconductor.
Avalanching or arcing to create EM pusles is the eventual goal, but you don't want it INSIDE your circuit.
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Wednesday 23rd November 2016 01:30 GMT harmjschoonhoven
Re: Several pieces of equipment melted
At Los Alamos National Laboratory they have explosively pumped flux compression generators, devices used to generate a high-power electromagnetic pulse by compressing magnetic flux using high explosives. EPFCGs are intended to selfdestruct.
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Wednesday 23rd November 2016 08:15 GMT JamieL
Emergency stop buttons - that unstated weakness
Reminds me of a firm I worked for who had installed so much tech in their building that the power supply couldn't handle it. Never mind, get a big container genny in the car park. And, since the tech is more important than kettles and lights and stuff, leave the computer room on the main power and wire the rest of the building into the genny.
All was fine until some kids in the car park one evening wondered what happens when you press the big red button.... genny winds down, all the doors pop open!
More worryingly, how many times have you driven past critical locations (cell towers, office blocks) and seen cooling fans on the outside with that appealing big red button. Press a few and you can be long away before the kit on the other end overheats and services start dropping.
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Thursday 24th November 2016 18:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Emergency stop buttons - that unstated weakness
Unfortunately, when you're dealing with anything of an inherently-dangerous nature (like petroleum or high-current electricity), the Panic Button is kinda necessary. Better all the doors open than the current causes the building to burn to the ground, you know. When you're at the point you have to actually USE a Panic Button, security isn't the biggest of your concerns anymore.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
