14 Year Old Boy Hacks, And Derails, Trains

(Thanks to Marcin)

Thanks to some good old hardware hacking, a Polish teen built an infrared device that let him switch around the tracks.

Twelve people were injured in one derailment, and the boy is suspected of having been involved in several similar incidents. 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.

Wow.

I guess I don't get to rant about SCADA security today.

—Rich