Nope, even though it might sound like the beginnings of a joke, there was nothing laughable about what a Polish teen had accomplished by hacking the tram system in the city of Lodz and managing to derail four trams, injure twelve people and interrupt service with his prank.
I ran across a post on The Register that referenced the story originally reported in The Telegraph here. It seems that a 14-year old described by his teachers as a model student and "electronics genius" adapted a television remote control so it could change track points and turned the Lodz tram system into his own Lionel train set:
"Questioned by police in the presence of a psychologist, the teenager testified he switched tram tracks three times, once causing a tram to jump the tracks," said the statement. A search at the boy's home turned up the device he had used to switch tram tracks.
Miroslaw Micor, a spokesman for Lodz police, said: "He studied the trams and the tracks for a long time and then built a device that looked like a TV remote control and used it to manoeuvre the trams and the tracks.
"He had converted the television control into a device capable of controlling all the junctions on the line and wrote in the pages of a school exercise book where the best junctions were to move trams around and what signals to change."
Police said the boy will face a special juvenile court on charges of endangering public safety.
This makes me wonder what other types of network accessible systems could be hacked to cause general mayhem. I'm reminded of Seth Green's character, Lyle, in "The Italian Job" controlling the traffic lights in L.A. to assist his cohorts. I've also read here that there are concerns that supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that are used by utilities and in manufacturing could be compromised, so now I'm wondering if what was done in Poland as a prank, could be done with more harmful intent on a wider scale elsewhere.
A recent report by the US Federal Aviation Administration raised concerns that a passenger aboard the new Boeing 787 "Dreamliner" aircraft might be able to hack into the aircraft's systems via its internet connection. How's that for making people even more nervous about flying?
Do you think I'm being too much of a "Chicken Little" here or do you think hackers may soon be setting their sights beyond acquiring personal/financial data to taking down a power grid or something else of the sort? I'm wondering if hackers might already be hired as mercenaries to perform technical grunt work of this sort for less savory characters.
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