MAKEzine: Electronic crime in Waterloo

Recently, the Record wrote an article on how criminals were sabotaging point-of-sale machines by installing keylogging components to read bank & credit cards for cloning. This made the pages of MAKE’s blog and Sparkfun.

That’s bad enough, but I worry probably won’t be long before someone puts 2 and 2 together to equal 5 and suspect some kind of correlation between that and kwartzlab and MakeKW. After all, many of us are diehard SparkFun customers, can make a bucket of random electronics dance, and passionately enjoy the art of the hack.

But that would not be true. The thefts described above are reprehensible. I can say with certainty that our group draws the line at criminal behaviour. Quite the opposite – we want (actually, need) the goodwill of our community. We believe in being a positive member of the community, and using our expertise and resources to add to it, not steal from it.

With 3 excellent post-secondary institutions and a great number of knowledge industries, Waterloo Region is fast becoming a world leader in electronic development. This theft is a sad acknowledgment of the side effects of this. I hope that all responsible are caught, and that our community does not gain a notoriety for electronic crime.

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