Researchers have demonstrated a vulnerability in the computer systems used to control facilities at federal prisons that could allow an outsider to remotely take them over, doing everything from opening and overloading cell door mechanisms to shutting down internal communications systems. Tiffany Rad, Teague Newman, and John Strauchs, who presented their research on October 26 at the Hacker Halted information security conference in Miami, worked in Newman's basement to develop the attacks that could take control of prisons' industrial control systems and programmable logic controllers. They spent less than $2,500 and had no previous experience in dealing with those technologies. The ...