New passports could be vulnerable to hackers

IDENTITY thieves will be able to access and copy personal details stored on the country’s new electronic passports with simple devices available to buy off the internet.

Last week, a German computer technician showed an IT conference in the US how he copied the details of his own passport and declared “the whole passport design is totally brain damaged”.

Lukas Grunwald took the data off a bio-metric chip that has been adopted as the standard for all new passports by the United Nation’s International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).