Even under the best of circumstances, the outcome is not good.
“A malicious cyber breach of PTC or underlying existing rail signaling systems could wreak havoc and cause accidents or derailments on the highly interdependent freight railway network,” retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. John Adams, president of Guardian Six, said in prepared testimony to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.Perhaps so, although the way railroads try to make do with less, a delay of a few minutes to a train, while tech support "addresses the issue" (and what is it about the tech types that they can't say "defective" or "broken" or even "bad ordered") might mess up the locomotive and crew rotations and maintenance schedules even without any broken trains or injured people.
Since PTC does not allow for operating a train, hacking the system might merely bring trains to a halt.
“With positive train control, if you quote-unquote break into or hack into positive train control, you will probably break a component, which is going to cause a train to stop,” [NCC Group technical director Jim] McKenney said. “It’s a very complex set of paths that you must really contemplate and have a lot of information, a lot of very specific technologies and skillsets to even contemplate trying to quote-unquote hack into positive train control and cause it to not stop a train and cause a derailment or cause a head-on train collision.”
2 comments:
No question they could create chaos...but a derailment or a collision? Have the interlocking / vital-circuit concepts been totally supplanted & negated by PTC?
One of the majors, I think it was Norfolk Southern, is already allowing key employees home access to the real-time network information...train locations, switch positions, etc. *Supposed* to be read-only access...
"Supposed to be read-only." Famous last words? And if somebody with malice figures out how to get the real-time location of an ethanol or light crude train?
I suspect Mr McKenny's point is that the interlocking and vital circuit components will be protected. But we have a federal mandate with an arbitrary deadline, the railroads are making up the technology as they go along (the latest gem: there's still no way for the circuitry to distinguish a 240 car coal train from a seven car Hiawatha) with no generally accepted common standard (the Big Boy has two kinds of train control boxes on it, for instance), and there's no limit to how clever hackers can be.
Even if the best the bad guys can do is get control of the signals, for instance sending a false "train in block" message, at the wrong time that puts a heavy train descending a hill into emergency, and what happens next will not be amusing.
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