Gallery: The Greatest Hits of Samy Kamkar, YouTube's Favorite Hacker
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Hacker Samy Kamkar in his workspace.
Julian Berman for WIRED.02-MG-7075
Kamkar’s OwnStar device can be planted on a target car, and uses a Raspberry Pi and three radios to intercept smartphone connections between an app and the car to remotely locate, unlock and even start the engine of the victim’s vehicle.
Samy Kamkar03-rolljam3
Like OwnStar, Kamkar’s Rolljam device can be planted on a car to intercept radio connections. But instead of exploiting a smartphone app’s vulnerabilities, it hijacks the “rolling code” signal from a key fob and stores it so that the hacker can pick up the gadget and unlock the vehicle later.
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With just $10 in equipment including a small chip and a coil of copper wire, Kamkar built MagSpoof, a device that can spoof credit cards’ electromagnetic signals and even predict a stolen card’s replacement number after it’s cancelled.
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After finding a technique that can crack a Masterlock combination lock in just eight tries, Kamkar 3D-printed a tiny robot that can perform the cracking technique automatically in 30 seconds.
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Older garage door openers still use insecure encryption that can be bruteforced. Kamkar proved that vulnerability with a device he created from a reprogrammed kid’s radio toy called the IM-ME.
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Kamkar’s invention called the KeySweeper is a fake USB charger that plugs into a wall and uses an iternal arduino and an antenna to silently intercept the keystrokes of a nearby wireless keyboard.
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Kamkar rose to fame for creating the Samy Worm, which ripped through MySpace, writing the phrase “Samy is My Hero” on a million pages in 24 hours and earning him a raid from the secret service. Here he poses with web hackers Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen
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Kamkar says he doesn’t try to profit from his hacks, but takes his reward from his YouTube fans and the thrill of discovery. “When I can exploit something in a way no one has done before, it’s probably one of the greatest feelings in the world,” he says. “I’m always chasing that feeling."
