A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about how easy it would be for a hacker to steal the information embedded in the computer chip inside your passport.

Friday the State Department warned 400 passport applicants of a security breach in its records system that may have left them open to identity theft. Although the breach is not related to how your personal information is stored in your passport, it does represent a major issue that only increases the fear some people have about how their private information is handled by the government and the private sector.

The State Department have already notified 383 people (most from Washington DC) that their passport application containing personal information, including Social Security number may have been illegally accessed and used to open fraudulent credit card accounts.

The breach was noticed back in March, but the State Department has not released any additional information on how it occurred, other than to say that it is still under investigation. So far one man has been arrested and one State Dpt. employee had been reassigned and might face further disciplinary action pending completion of the investigation

In my old blog, I had describe some of the security risks associated with the new RFID tags that are being embeded into the new passports that the US and other countries are issuing.
In that post I wrote how easy would be for someone to steal your identity without even touching your passport simply by reading the RFID chip with a special scanner at a reasonable distance.
Now a group of hackers had gone a step further and demonstrated a technique to change the data stored in the RFID chip thus giving them the ability to crease fake passports with whatever information they choose.
They posted their finding and even the methodology they used to hack the passports on their website for the world to see.
Any person willing to spend $80.00 in cheap electronic equiptment can pretty much read your personal information from your passport and then move it to their own fake passport. Picture included.