McAfee: using NFC at Olympics is risky

The mobile community’s been getting rather hyped about the potential of NFC, and how it seems on-track to become a fully-fledged payment method within the next couple of years. While certain networks around the world are already working on integrating NFC into their SIM cards, McAfee have warned that we should be careful about using it to make payments.

McAfee have spoken out in the wake of Google fixing a vulnerability on their mobile wallet that allowed attackers to hack other users’ wallet accounts.

“One can get excellent results by targeting the OS and its NFC-handling libraries,” McAfee mobile security researcher Jimmy Shah said in a blog post today. “Fuzzing the hardware, which involves feeding corrupt or damaged data to an app to discover vulnerabilities, is a good first step.”

Shah went on to point out that the 2012 Olympics – where Samsung will be handing out Galaxy S3‘s to trialists and athletes as a way of testing out NFC payment methods – will be a perfect potential target for attackers.

“The Olympics will also provide a concentrated pool of targets (people and phones) to pilfer from – especially if everyone is busy watching who wins the medals and not worrying about where his or her phone is,” he said.

[Source: The Inquirer]