UPDATE: Mythbusters Host Retracts RFID Censorship Comments

Credit card companies successfully nixed a Mythbusters segment exposing RFID’s security flaws, according to Arbiter of Truth and Mythbusters co-host, Adam Savage.

Despite increasingly widespread use in passports and credit cards, radio-frequency identification is notoriously insecure. Hackers have successfully hijacked RFID-enabled credit cards from almost 70-feet away. Mythbusters had arranged a conference call with Texas Instruments to explore a similarly depressing demonstration.

Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else… They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it’s on Discovery’s radar and they won’t let us go near it.

In related news, here’s a post showing how to steal RFID credit card information with $8 worth of equipment from eBay.

Arphid Watch: Mythbusters and RFID [Wired via BoingBoing and Caveat Emptor]
(Photo: Getty)