RFID tags can catch viruses

Researchers at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam gave a live demonstration of an RFID virus at the Fourth Annual IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (IEEE PerCom) in Pisa, Italy. The attacks exploit the same software weaknesses that PC viruses and worms do and can have the same devastating consequences.

Melanie Rieback, a Ph.D. student supervised by Andrew Tanenbaum, showed that an infected RFID label can infect a middleware database, which could potentially trigger the middleware to produce more infected RFID tags. The group set up an informational web site about RFID Viruses and Worms to give information about their work on RFID malware.