The 5 Coolest Hacks of '07

ancientribe writes "Nothing was sacred to hackers in '07 — not cars, not truckers, and not even the stock exchange. Dark Reading reviews five hacks that went after everyday things we take for granted even more than our PC's — our car navigation system, a trucker's freight, WiFi connections, iPhone, and (gulp) the electronic financial trading systems that record our stock purchases and other online transactions."

Comments

obvious

[User 956]

Page 5: 'Hacking capitalism'

I've heard of that before.

Re:Bluetooth cracking didnt make the list?

[Anonymous Coward]

probably because this is the '07 list, not the '04 list.

Re:Yippie, another slashdigg toplist!

[log1385]

Now all we need is a "Top Ten 'Top Ten Lists' of 2007!"

Re:Already slashdotted

[paulmac84]

Coral Cache:

http://www.darkreading.com.nyud.net/document.asp?doc_id=142127&WT.svl=news1_2

site slashdotted...

[Orthuberra]

or was it hacked???

Financial systems? Nothing new there

[mcsqueak]

This isn't quite a real "hack", but more of a "social hack" if you will.

In 1967 Abbie Hoffman and a group of protesters thew fake money onto the floor of the NYSE (it wasn't blocked by glass back then). Trading on the floor *actually stopped* while traders scrambled around trying to collect the money. Kinda ironic that they'd stop to do that, considering how much more they were actually making doing their real trading. Wikipedia has a little bit on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbie_Hoffman. I don't really know much about Hoffman, but I found the story very amusing myself.

Hacking what now..?

[ricebowl]

"Nothing was sacred to hackers in '07 -- not cars, not truckers..."

Somebody hacked a trucker? Holy hell...I hope never to see that one documented Hackaday.

3. Eighteen-wheelers

[FudRucker]

when i drove an 18 wheeler i hauled a some very expensive loads, once i picked up a load of Macintosh computers from Apple's Sacramento's warehouse and hauled them to Omaha Nebraska, another time i picked up wine (the kind you can drink) in several locations in northern California and hauled them to Little Rock Arkansas, thats just two examples, the Macs were the most expensive, (i bet there were close to half a million dollars worth of freight in Macs) when Apple was loading those Macs they told me to only stop at well lighted truck stops & stay away from roadside rest areas and given me a designated route along with the bill of lading...

Re:3. Eighteen-wheelers

[gyrogeerloose]

Former long-haul Big Truck driver here, too (I still drive one locally on occasion), and I often carried high-value loads. One time I hauled a load of cell phones from Texas to California and Motorola paid to have a pair of former FBI agents in a black Lincoln Towncar tail me the entire way. I was driving as part of a team then so there were no stops except for fuel. I was put off by the idea it at first--what, you don't trust me?--but after a while, it made me feel safe. That long stretch of two-lane between Ft. Worth and Amarillo seems pretty remote at 0200...

Number one is FUD

[mi]

RDS-TMC provides broadcasts on traffic conditions, accidents, and detours for the driver. It's main weakness: It doesn't authenticate where the traffic comes from, the researchers say. That leaves the door wide open for a bad guy to reroute drivers to a detour, or to overwhelm it with a DDOS, killing the navigation system as well as its climate-control system and stereo. [...] There's not much you can do until it's too late and your AC and stereo are out, and you're sitting on a hot and dusty, deserted road nowhere near Starbucks.

Uhm, bullshit. The worst this attack can do is to either

1. shut the electronics down completely — in which case you'll know, something is wrong long before the last Starbucks is out of sight
2. fool your GPS into believing, there is some sort of interference (accident, jam) ahead, which will simply cause the device to pick an alternate (and sub-optimal) route. You will not be lost, you'll just arrive later.

In neither case does Kelly's mother need to be concerned with "how a hacker could redirect her brand-new car navigation system to a deserted dead end street far from her intended destination." For that one needs to be able to pretend to be a group of satellites. This possibility the article does not cover — either due to the (mentioned) lack of imagination (on behalf of the author itself), or because it is not really possible (because Pentagon's designers of the system thought about it first, maybe).

Re:Number one is FUD

[gyrogeerloose]

Better have a diesel engine in this case. Nothing electric to be hacked.

Actually, modern diesels are as computer-driven as gasoline engines. Maybe even more so in the case of large trucks--on every 18-wheeler I've driven in the past ten years, there was no physical linkage between the accelerator pedal ("the hammer," in trucker's lingo) and the engine. Instead, there was a digital position sensor and a multi-conductor cable that fed data to the ECU. All the gauges on the instrument panel were computer-controlled as well.

Prediction for 2008 hacks...

[YU5333021]

No.1 hack for 2008 will be the new electronic passports as discussed in the previous Slashdot discussion.

No.2 will be the the voting machines, but that only gets a second place because it's a dupe from 4 years ago.

No.3 will be the poor truckers again. We should really revert back from robotic drivers.

and No.4 will be slashdot's grammar and spelling checking engine, although this will be done in a fairly low-tech manner. The ten submission monkeys will be poisoned and their typewriters tinkered with...

The iPhone hack was a little funny IMO...

[DigitAl56K]

I personally have to smirk at the Apple brigade who on one hand spent the year touting everything Apple as more secure, and on the other hand rushed to jailbreak their iPhones by simply viewing a web page embedding a malformed image.

My next project

[Anonymous Coward]

"... built tools for hacking satellite-based navigation systems that use Radio Data System-Traffic Message Channel (RDS-TMC) to receive traffic broadcasts and emergency messages ... The researchers tested their hardware and software tools with a one- to five-kilometer radius of the targeted vehicles, but they say an attacker could target a specific vehicle by adding a directional antenna, for instance ..."

I think I'm going to invest some effort in this, and build a system that allows me to send messages to the NAV display of other vehicles to say things like:

"Pull the fuck out of the fast lane jackass."

or

"Turn your goddamned high beams off you stupid sack of shit."

Hack, schmack

[sm62704]

I used to be a gay hacker. Then they changed the meanings of all the words, now I'm a happey equipment modifier. No, I'm heterosexual but they changed the meaning of "gay" from "happy and carefree" to "homosexual" and changed the meaning of "hacker" from "someone who writes quick-and-dirty but functional code, or modifies equipment" to "an electronic burglar".

I was incredibly disappointed with the article (RTFA? I must be new here), so much so that I made it no farther than page one of the short five page adfest. I thought it was going to be about hacking a wi-fi connection so that it doubled as a firewall or something. We nerds still use "hacker" in the old fashioned sense, just as we geezers still sing "deck the halls" without thinking about sodomy.

Ok, I know language evolves, but unlike the evolution of organisms the evolution of language is usually stupid. Like "gay", which now means "homosexual", half of whom attempt suicide. I never could understand what was so gay about suicide. Now the kids are twisting the word "gay" to mean clumsy, stupid, or dorky.

As to hacking, fine, now a hacker is a burglar. What do we nerds who write quick single-use code, or those of us who take a soldering iron to a transistor radio to turn it into something besides a radio, call ourselves now?

And could someone please point to an real NERD article somwhere that actually has the ten best hacks of 2007, instead of the ten best cracks of 2007?

I'm glad I can afford to be modded down because this really annoys me and I want to know what the rest of the slashdot audience thinks. I wish I'd seen this when it was fresh, nobody will likely seee this comment to mod it down anyway.

-mcgrew