Hackers Can Remotely Trigger the Brakes on American Trains and the Problem Has Been Ignored for Years

The only hackers skilled enough to pull this off also happen to have thing for trains.

Imagine being so poor you're driven to a doctor's appointment rather that having them come to you.

I can finally enact my Red Dead Redemption 2 fantasy and rob a train.

Billionaires take private jets or helicopters.

It’s like playing Mario Kart on Kalamari Desert. Sometimes you’re stuck waiting for a train and Luigi pulls up behind 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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

I've had it with these motherfucking brakes on this motherfucking 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.