Hackers Can Remotely Trigger the Brakes on American Trains and the Problem Has Been Ignored for Years
“All of the knowledge to generate the exploit already exists on the internet. AI could even build it for you,” the researcher told 404 Media.
If I were the leader of Putin's military, I would make a purchase of hazardous materials that are to be simultaneously transported throughout America. From there, a hacking operation to derail their transports at key locations while in transit. East Palestine x1,000+.
Considering that the Trump Regime is fully in Putin's pocket, this sort of thing would go completely unopposed and utterly cripple America's train network for a decade.
...seriously, this vulnerability can seriously fuck up my nation. 🤕
I guess this vulnerability has been ignored for years, because hackers also ignored it for years.
There's not a lot you can gain from this kind of vulnerability.
The only hackers skilled enough to pull this off also happen to have thing for trains.
Joke's on them, 50% of the brakes don't work.
This vulnerability would have to trigger the airbrakes, which every single railcar has, and every car's airbrakes are daisy chained together. Airbrakes are failsafe, in that any loss of pressure results in brake application, and a full loss of pressure means full application. So if just one car on the train has a problem with its brake lines, the whole train is stopping whether the railroad likes it or not
Everyone's joking but this is a serious problem. Imagine you're a billionaire and someone wants to assassinate you. The would-be assassin could figure out when you have a doctor's appointment (or similar) and force a train to get stuck, blocking their route.
It would leave the billionaire stuck in traffic with no escape until the train(s) started moving again. An entire cavalcade of security personnel would also be stuck (if they had one).
Aside: It could also work for robbing something like a Brinks truck but let's be honest: In this dystopian world it's more likely that this vulnerability would be used to rob a food shipment 🙄
Imagine being so poor you're driven to a doctor's appointment rather that having them come to you.
Temporarily stopping a train has only so many useful applications for crime, sabatage or terrorism. Might be useful to rob a train if you can stop it in a remote location and steal some high value goods, but realistically most goods are either bulk commodities or shipping containers which are intentionally difficult to identify the contents of when closed. Basically you're just forced to open some containers and hope you find goods valueble enough to resell and make the risk worth the reward
Potentially you could stop a train with some auto racks and steal the vehicles but the VINs will be immediately marked as stolen so the resale value is immediately trashed, plus you'd have to figure out the logistics of getting the vehicles off of a train stopped in the middle of nowhere (they use specialized ramps to drive the vehicles onto and off of the ends of the train when loading and unloading)
From a terrorism/nation state perspective maybe if you can fly some planes overhead and keep spamming a stop signal for a few days you might be able to cause some logistics chaos by stopping all trains in the vicinity of a busy railroad yard, but given modern flight tracking that's extremely identifiable. Better to setup unmanned ground transmitters but that runs the risk of being caught/identified too quickly, and wireless signal triangulation is so easy there's even hobbiest events where people try to manually triangulate a signal for fun. Maybe if an attacked setup several base stations around the country and only sent the brake application signal extremely rarely they could lower rail reliability enough to cause some issues but to cause enough trouble to actually be useful from a nation state/terrorism point of view they'd have to show their cards. Honestly a terrorist or sabatuer is probably better off just blowing up a few bridges and tunnels which would be far more effective
Now that is the kind of story that would trigger a new attempt to fix this.
It’s like playing Mario Kart on Kalamari Desert. Sometimes you’re stuck waiting for a train and Luigi pulls up behind you.
I can finally enact my Red Dead Redemption 2 fantasy and rob a train.
Yeah! Go for it!
I'm curious to see how you'll haul away 19,600 gallons of corn syrup, 3,900 bushels of grain, 100 tons of random auto parts, 80 tons of paper reams, 70 tons of logs, 13,000 gallons of ammonia (or other dangerous chemicals), and the various other things that typically get shipped via rail these days.
You might get lucky and find a boxcar full of canned goods 👍
...or maybe even actual cars but... How would you get them off the train without the necessary equipment/track setup? 🤔
I don’t see a problem in your hypothetical scenario 🤔
Or they can just get their IED on if they know the route and timeline to the degree that they can stop a train AFTER the point of no return. Otherwise it is just "Oh. 4th street is closed. I guess we'll take 8th street instead"
Its a problem. On the grand list of problems... it should be higher than it is but not all that much higher.
OK, I'm waiting for this movie. Go on, draw stuff. I'll wait right here. Could the good guy be Jacky Chan please?
As long as it's also ignored by hacker you should be fine.
Considering how much rail regulations and budgets have been slashed in the past few years, we will probably end up using it as a feature. Safety hackers will need to make sure trains stop on the correct place/time, because there are only 1-2 employees for a 300 car train.
Or alternatively, tune in and subscribe for 'Twitch Drives a Cargo Train!'
I may be misremembering, but wasn’t there a thing 10 3 years ago or so where trains were randomly stopping somewhere in Europe. And I think it turned out to be a remote shutdown from the manufacturer (according to independent investigators. The manufacturer maintains that hackers added that code to their software) due to 3rd party replacement parts or an unrenewed service contract or some other anticompetitive behavior.
Edit: Jiminy Cricket! It feels like it’s been 10 years. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/manufacturer-deliberately-bricked-trains-repaired-by-competitors-hackers-find/
It was in Poland but in Poland you can still stop trains with radio signal of a specific frequency. No encryption, no validation. Anyone with a hobbyist level radio equipment can stop freight trains. And they do. Train operators usually just call the station, confirm that it's a prank and 5 minutes later start again.
https://www.wired.com/story/poland-train-radio-stop-attack/
Poland's national transportation agency has stated its intention to upgrade Poland's railway systems by 2025 to use almost exclusively GSM cellular radios, which do have encryption and authentication. But until then, it will continue to use the relatively unprotected VHF 150 MHz system that allows the radio-stop commands to be spoofed.
I just had an idea for a movie.
I've had it with these motherfucking brakes on this motherfucking train.
Are we talking fediveese hackers? You know, the socialist-furries-with-UNIX-socks hackers?
Those folks hate cars, not trains. I don't think we need to worry.
Yeah, but train yard sys admins are furries too (duh), maybe this is just a harmless place for their courtship rituals - train admins know the fediverse furries won't cause some insane immoral damage, so they don't patch their Win95 systems, so they just wait for the hack & that's when they slip into their DMs (like an ASCII fancy socks pic or something).
Wow, just something like 1200 baud FSK on 70cm. That's stupid simple, and stupid. They could use cellular modems (the locomotives already have one, normally) or LoRaWAN or....anything without even trying and it would be an improvement.
They could use cellular modems (the locomotives already have one, normally) or LoRaWAN
The answer to a hyper-localized security issue isn't attaching the equipment to an insecure network nor is it shifting to use insecure IoT type devices.
If you have rail standards of the 21st century cellular is absolutely what you should be using for rail see: GSM-R . Apparently the DOT is even looking at this.
Now you'd need to build cellular infrastructure along your lines for that system. US rail owners are terminally uninterested in building or maintaining rail infrastructure so that's not particularly likely to happen unless mandated.
But $!
For that one guy.
Outweighs the safety of a nation.
Don't you get it yet? You don't live in a society, you live in capitalism.
Cyberpunk train robberies.
Why not?
The economy is crashing, we'll just return to our Wild West roots, with a modern twist.
Not robberies of people, of course, the vast majority of American rail transit is logistics, moving stuff.
Why rip the copper wires out of an abandoned house or office when you could just get some guys with pickup trucks and get it from the source?
I'm all for it. The social contract was ripped in half a century and half ago. I'm ready AF, I saw this shit coming and prepared, I can live off the land like a motherfucker, and I already don't own shit.
You got a house, a car, a dog, a family to provide for? Yeah, you drank the koolaid and when the shit hits the fan you're all gonna die. I can't fucking wait to see this shit come crashing down- you all pumped money into it, now eat the consequences.
There is no fix. The mitigation is to buy a new train.
Yeah like our profit motivated CEOs will make the capital investment to buy a brand new train instead of lobbying to lower safety standards and regional regulations.
I heard about metro trains getting bricked after 3rd party repairs. This makes it sound like freight trains but it paywalls quickly.
On Polish Railway such signal is a well documented safety feature, and the police was quite successful hunting down morons who abused it last year.
Sounds like a useful tool for any revolutionaries out there.
'You wouldn't download an emergency train brake button (that is still functionally connected to the train you didn't download)'
I was thinking about taking a train ride for my birthday...