RFID viruses

PCPro have a story that it has been proven possible to get viruses to spread via RFID tags.

An RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tag is a small chip which constantly broadcasts a radio signal. Each chip broadcasts a different signal, so each chip can be uniquely identified. They are increasingly being used to track stock and goods in transit, as a base station can work out exactly where each piece of stock or goods is.

What this discovery by Dutch researchers means is that if a security flaw is found in the RFID software, malicious hackers could hack into one of these base stations and also be able to track all the stock. They would then be able to spread the virus to all of the RFID tags in its range, and track them too.

As yet, this is only a possibility and it would need a lot of things to come together exactly right for it to happen, but in the future, who knows if this will be exploited by malicious hackers to gain access to a warehouse's stock database or something more sinister?