These implants rely on inductive charging — the same technology used to wirelessly charge smartphones — and Noe claims they don’t trigger airport scanners.
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Noe often uses social engineering — he might ask you to show him a funny video on your phone, for example — and then quickly hacks your device within seconds through what’s called a URL redirect attack.
Almost all modern smartphones have an NFC chip — the technology that powers Apple Pay and Google Pay — and Noe can typically use that chip to take over a smartphone in less than 30 seconds. He can also quickly copy your company’s key card.
“The amount of personally identifiable information on your cell phone is at least 100 times what’s in your wallet,” Noy said. “In the United States, we have health and privacy laws, and these implants are considered medical because they’re inside my body, which means the authorities aren’t even allowed to ask about them.”
Noy said his tough upbringing on the streets of Detroit, where he spent 15 years in various motorcycle gangs, made him realize he wanted to use his hacking skills for good, not evil. He now works for Israeli cybersecurity firm CyberArk, where he serves as a technical evangelist for the company and carries out attacks himself to better understand how hackers think and operate.
The hacker’s next project, which he has been working on for 18 months, is to surgically implant a minicomputer in his leg. He also has a book due out later this year, The Hacker: My Life and Lessons Learned as the World’s First Ethical Augmented Hacker.
“Ignorance of the existence of people like me and the abilities we possess is what will allow me to bypass your security.”
The main message he is trying to get across is simple. He said, “I want to open the eyes of the rest of the world to the fact that there is a subspecies out there. We are not necessarily all dangerous, but some of us are. It is the ignorance of the existence of people like me and the capabilities we possess that will allow me to bypass your security.
“How can you stop an attack if you don’t know it’s there? In Melbourne, I’ll be demonstrating five different attacks that will demonstrate the destructiveness and capabilities of these types of implants.”
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Another message Noe sends is that a lot of time and energy has been spent on cyber defenses and digital security, but physical security is often overlooked.
“When you log in now, you have multi-factor authentication to help prove your identity. But we still have doors leading to physical locations with a single point of access.
“In my opinion, physical security is the biggest threat posed by trans people, but we need to give our physical locations at least the same scrutiny that we give our digital locations.”
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