‘Simple cyber attack stall rail network’

The attack can easily be mastered by teenage hackers.

A simple form of cyber attack which can easily be mastered by teenage hackers could bring railway networks to a standstill,a security expert has warned.

Anyone who knows how to unleash a “denial of service” attack could cause such disruptions in major rail networks around the world,said to Stefan Katzenbeisser,professor at Technische Universitat Darmstadt in Germany.

The vulnerability,he pinpointed,is due to mobile phone signals used to link railway switching systems together that would allow hackers to cause massive service disruption.

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“Denial of service” campaigns are one of the simplest forms of cyber attack,where hackers recruit large numbers of computers to overwhelm the targeted system with Internet traffic,Prof Katzenbeisser said.

The attacks,he said,require less skill than penetrating a computer network or writing malicious software and hackers have used the approach to attack sites of government agencies around the world and sites of businesses,Daily Mail reported.

“Trains could not crash,but service could be disrupted for quite some time,” said Katzenbeisser.

According to Prof Katzenbeisser,train switching systems,which enable trains to be guided from one track to another at a railway junction,have historically been separate from the online world,but communication between trains and switches is handled increasingly using wireless technology.

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The use of “connected” systems renders them vulnerable to cyber attack,he claimed.

Train networks,according the expert,have become more vulnerable in recent years as separate switching systems have become connected via wireless signals.

GSM-R,or GSM-railway,a mobile technology used for train communications,is more secure than the usual GSM used in phones. But it’s still vulnerable to hackers who manage to lay hands on one security key,Prof Katzenbeisser said.

“Probably we will be safe on that side in coming years.

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The main problem I see is a process of changing security keys.

This will be a big issue in the future,how to manage these keys safely,” Katzenbeisser said.

The software encryption keys,needed for securing the communication between trains and switching systems,are downloaded to physical media like USB sticks and then sent to offices to be installed,raising the risk of them ending up in the wrong hands,he explained.

If one of the keys was lost,hackers could then attack and overwhelm a railway network’s switching system,he added.