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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

My first thought when seeing the headline was: if they actually hacked into the control system to stop the trains, could they also hack into the German train system to make the trains go on time?

But sadly the hack was merely an emergency stop signal. It sounds like it's about as much a hack as pulling the emergency brake.

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If disabling car remotely in specific area is the same as turning off the ignition key in these cars/using the parking brake, then yes. As the information how to do that should not be public and was not meant to be used be anyone, but only by authorized people (technology from 70') it's kind of hack. Exactly as using the Blue boxes[1] to hack telephone networks

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box

The term is 'security by obscurity' and it doesn't work. Because it's only a few bits of information and once documented it is a matter of time before the data is out there.

In this case: the data is the same for large swaths of the former USSR so it isn't strange at all that an enemy actor has access to that information. Poland could do the exact same thing to Russia. But I hope they have better ethics.

> could they also hack into the German train system to make the trains go on time?

Even if they could hack into the system, I don't think they can do miracles.

>could they also hack into the German train system to make the trains go on time?

Knowing German "digitalisation", the train system probably runs on pen, paper, letters, phone calls and faxes, making it resilient to cyber attacks. Your move hackers!

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