July 26, 2012 – Apple blackballed the genius that figured out a way to hack their smartphone.

This is not something that most of us would have to worry over simply because the hacker must be very close to the phone to do it. However, it is something you need to consider if you deal with critical, important information and you do a lot of travel using hotels and motels a lot.

Network World - At the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas Wednesday, Accuvant Labs researcher Charlie Miller showed how he figured out a way to break into both the Google/Samsung Nexus S and Nokia N9 by means of the Near Field Communication (NFC) capability in the smartphones.

NFC is still new but its starting to become adopted for use in smartphone-based purchasing in particular. The experimentation that Miller did, which he demonstrated at the event, showed its possible to set up NFC-based radio communication to share content with the smartphones to play tricks, such as writing an exploit to crash phones and even in certain circumstances read files on the phone and more.

I can read all the files, said Miller about how he managed to break into the Nokia 9 when his home-made NFC-based device is in very close proximity to the targeted smartphone. I can make phone calls, too. Vulnerabilities he identified in the Android-powered Nexus S were located in the browser surface, he said. NFC works at near-contact range, and it could not be used to attack from any distance.