Having a strange airport employee looking at your "naked" image on a full-body x-ray scanner might be disturbing enough. But what if hackers got access to your "virtual strip search" and distributed it to an even wider audience?
Authorities have gone to significant lengths to appease privacy advocates about x-ray scanners, but protection from technological intrusions haven't featured in explanations.
Hackers have successfully cracked open bank accounts, government websites and even the private Yahoo email account of would-be US vice president Sarah Palin ... so why not an airport x-ray machine?
"From the attackers perspective, it's more around how secure the computers are that control the x-ray machine," said Ty Miller, chief technology officer of Pure Hacking, which tests the security of websites and online systems.
"The way to hack in and get access to images would be by accessing the computers controlling them. There's someone sitting there at a computer hitting 'enter' as people go through [to be scanned], and it's possible that that computer might have some sort of vulnerability, just as any desktop might."
Alan Watt, head of forensics at e.law and who has researched cyber-terrorism, said most computer software had a "back door" that could be exploited by hackers.
"If the x-ray software is owned and managed by some company in Seattle, they often have a back door that allows them to perform remote maintenance."
If a hacker came in via that backdoor, "it would be the same for them as being in front of computer, it doesn't matter if they're sitting 100 miles away [from the airport]", he said.
They would then have access to data stored on the computer.
Authorities say scanned images will not be stored.
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