Tuesday, March 27, 2007

I'm glad you got your kid back

Erik takes his kids to Disneyland, but manages to lose the 3-year-old. But that's OK, he had hung a USB flash drive around the kid's neck, and had him back within 13 minutes.
Our three year old did just what we thought he would do - Disappeared. Within 13 minutes of being ‘lost’ though, my cellphone rang.
The little scamp.

Anyway, I actually am glad he got his kid back so quickly. Nothing is worse than having your young child go missing. But...

So the father planned ahead, that's good. If you'd like to do the same yourself, I see that SurplusComputers has a 2-pack of similar-sounding drives for about $8.

But I can't say I recommend you do that. Instead, I recommend that you plant the equivalent of a dog tag on your kid. It's no worse than the USB version, and you're much more likely to get someone with a cell phone and no computer handy to just read the tag and call you.

Heck, if you know you're probably going to lose your kid at Disneyland, I bet you could get them back in just 5 minutes with the dog tag.

Oh, and I see the lost USB drive thing just relies on Autorun to pop up the message. Disneyland Security, you just got pwned by a 3-year-old. Pentesters, are you paying attention?

Found via The Disney Blog.

3 comments:

Juan Miguel Paredes said...

That sounds like a roundabout way of doing things. A dogtag would certainly have been a quicker way. Although I can think of even MORE roundabout ways of doing this:

* USB drive auto run installs a trojan than requires a reboot.
* When system reboots, a beacon gets sent to website when the source IP is geo-located.
* using servers around the globe, the beaconing is repeated and the latency, hopcounts and ip addresses are using to calculate the location of the computer.
* subscriber gets a neat report with all the findings a day later.
* What kid? :-)

It sounds like this "dad" is more concerned about being cool with his techie toys than keeping an eye on his kids. If one wants to including geeky-ness in this scenario, how about a usb thumbdrive sized thing-a-ma-jig that when pressed gives instructions on contacting the parents.

Ryan Russell said...

So after I wrote this I was trying to think if there was a good scenario for a toddler to have a USB key. I pondered training the kid to insert his concealed USB key into a computer if he got kidnapped, and it would rootkit the box and phone home. I think I could train a 3-year-old to find a USB port and insert the drive.

But it would have to be a Windows box that was on, logged-in, had an Internet connection, and available USB ports.

I have to think teaching your kid to dial 911 and yelling "help" into the phone in that situation would be much more useful.

Skafian said...

We could always just insert GPS transmitters just underneath our kids skin. :)