trading , digital currency wallets and insurance . Each of them in less than eight minutes . Today , Knight is an ethical hacker or , ‘ penetration tester ’, if you don ’ t want to use the ‘ H ’ word . Regardless , whether it ’ s cars , financial services , or anything else , if it exists , she can hack it .
FinTech was fortunate to take some time with Knight towards the end of the event , during which we discussed her app research in more detail – the results of which she has been delivering on a whirlwind tour around the world – and picked her brains on cybersecurity in the financial services sector . “ Generally , the reaction has kind of been ‘ you have to be kidding me , this is crazy ’,” she explained . “ It ’ s a real problem and , basically , I ’ m the one that gets paid to be the bearer of bad news , which feels pretty cool .”
That ‘ news ’ is that Knight – has also spent her time in Stuttgart , Germany ‘ penetration testing ’ connected vehicles by taking control of their steering and braking – downloaded 30 leading financial services apps and reverse engineered them all , finding hardcoded API keys , tokens and credentials for the banks and their third-party payment processors , and having the run of their data in the backend . The results , she conceded , were “ pretty bad ”, adding that “ the numbers were a lot higher than I thought they would be – I thought it would be around 50 %. It ’ s clearly systemic , I really didn ’ t spend that long on the project , about a week in total , so when you put it in perspective that I hacked 29 banks in a week – we need to be doing better .”
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