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James Bond style attack on a networked world

Want to break into the computer network in an ultra-secure building?

Get Q to ship a hacked iPhone there to a nonexistent employee and hope the device sits in the mailroom, scanning for nearby wireless connections.

How about stealing someone's computer passwords? Forget trying to fool the person into downloading a malicious program that logs keystrokes. A tiny microphone hidden near the keyboard could do the same thing, since each keystroke emits slightly different sounds that can be used to reconstruct the words the target is typing.

Hackers at the DefCon conference here were demonstrating these and other novel techniques for infiltrating facilities on Friday.

Their talks served as a reminder of the danger of physical attacks as a way to breach hard-to-crack computer networks. It's an area once defined by Dumpster diving and crude social-engineering ruses, like phony phone calls, that are probably easier to detect or avoid.

As technology gets cheaper and more powerful, from cell phones that act as personal computers to minuscule digital bugging devices, it's enabling a new wave of clever attacks that, if pulled off properly, can be as effective and less risky for thieves than traditional computer-intrusion tactics.

Consider Apple Inc.'s iPhone, a gadget whose processing horsepower and cellular and wireless Internet connections make it an ideal double agent.

Robert Graham and David Maynor, co-founders of Atlanta-based Errata Security, showed off an experiment in which they modified an iPhone and sent it to a client company that wanted to test the security of its internal wireless network.

Graham and Maynor programmed the phone to check in with their computers over the cellular network. Once inside the target company and connected, a program they had written scanned the wireless network for security holes.

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