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Thieves in South Africa Hit Traffic Lights For SIM Cards
arisvega writes "Some 400 high-tech South African traffic lights are out of action after thieves in Johannesburg stole the mobile phone SIM cards they contain. JRA (Johannesburg Road Agency) said it is investigating the possibility of an 'inside job' after only the SIM card-fitted traffic lights were targeted. The cards were fitted to notify JRA when the traffic lights were faulty. 'We have 2,000 major intersections in Johannesburg and only 600 of those were fitted with the cards,' the agency's spokesperson Thulani Makhubela told the BBC. 'No-one apart from JRA and our supplier knows which intersections have that system.' The thieves ran up bills amounting to thousands of dollars by using the stolen cards to make calls."
Well jeez, you don't suppose the boxes in question might also have been, y'know, locked, like the other species of utilities boxes that reside in the vicinity of intersections?
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No that's the rational for suspecting an inside job and hence investigating that angle.
You would think it would be a no-brainer to have the SIM cards on some sort of custom phone plan which only allows calls to a fixed set of numbers, though.
Yes. And it works most of the time.
Security in the world of road side traffic systems is almost none existent. It's simply not a priority. You cannot pull of a "all green chaos attack" as in "the italian job" (safety systems protect unsafe situations), but you can cause major gridlock with ease if you know what you are doing.
We fit a lot of our systems with wireless GSM, it's pretty cheap but not that reliable. However, we arrange it so you cannot use those sims for calling, only GPRS/UMTS/3G connections to a private network.
(I could tell a thing or 2 about the speed camera's we produce, but that would break my NDA I guess)
The cost of GSM data isn't very high when all you're sending is "help I'm not working correctly". Since the link serves no other purpose, four bytes should be enough to send a basic diagnostic code.
SIM cards cost about ten cents, basic GSM hardware maybe a few dollars, and I think it's safe to assume all the poles are on a shared data plan.
Forgot to add, I'm an engineer at a traffic light manufacturer.
Isn't it possible that the thieves worked this out, and only targeted the lights with the antennas ?
SIM cards are typically protected with a SIM card.
That level of redundancy would make it doubly worth while to steal a sim. Two-Fer!!!
Are you sure you didn't mean a sim PIN is used to protect a sim card?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Why have GSM cell? fiber / wifi / microwave / e-net are cheaper when you look at the high cost of GSM data?
In use most lights use wired base cables for data passing to other lights / the data center.
Because outside of North America, the GSM system is significantly more robust than the alternatives, and allows you to lock down the communications. Of course, the fact that these SIMs were not locked down smacks of either incompetence or that the people setting up the system were in on the heist.
GSM data isn't cheap; but(at least in reasonably densely settled areas) it works more or less everywhere and the modules needed to add support for it are quite cheap.
More importantly, if the description that these were a 'fault alert' system is accurate, this is not a data-heavy application. Perhaps a few SMSes, per unit, per year, unless the units are really crap, or have to survive an especially brutal environment.
While(at least in the US) most telcoes wouldn't bother to spit on you if you asked for such a plan in quantity 1, I would strongly suspect that "We need 600 units, with the possibility of some thousands more over the coming years if things go well, SMS/GPRS only, low per-node usage" would get you a price that would be pretty favorable compared to rolling your own infrastructure.
If your plan is to put a battery of surveillance cameras on every streetlamp, or create some grand-unified-city-sensor-net, then cellular isn't going to be so hot; but it actually works pretty well for low frequency data reporting in settled areas...
I'm not sure why they were provisioned for voice at all. One would think that any fault reporting tasks could be more easily and cheaply handled as SMSes or GPRS transfers of a kb or two...
It isn't like there is a tiny little man in the control box who has to call when he is out of sandwiches or anything...
You cannot pull of a "all green chaos attack" as in "the italian job" (safety systems protect unsafe situations), but you can cause major gridlock with ease if you know what you are doing.
Surely it's "just" a matter of bypassing the electronics all together and keep the green light lit by powering it directly? Perhaps controlled by your own electronics to be able to have some control over the behavior. You'd need physical access, of course..
The vendor who built this system should have used an encoded PIN to tie the SIM to the embedded system it was built into. That way the SIM on it's own is fairly useless without the rest of the electronics.
They also should have had a 'phone home' facility so that whoever is monitoring the system would have noticed when the systems were compromised.
Fitting tamper switches to the enclosure (door opened, removed from pole, etc would have been smart.
Checking the bills on the cards to see where they are calling, how much has been spent, etc would have been smart
That would of course require someone to be routinely monitoring the system (it's not like traffic lights are there to save lives is it) so that things like this are not a surprise.
This really sounds like a system built by the cheapest tenderer - not unusual for a government organisation.
They don't have physics in south africa?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
...why are you calling from a traffic light?
in the us the data link is more then just fault alert lights are linked to each other some of same Controllers are used on ramp meters , lane control systems and more as well passing data on traffic levels.
any ways us data costs are high like $.01/KB, 1 MB - $4.99, 100 MB $19.99/mo or $35.00 for 200meg and then $0.10 per meg and that's the per line costs.
They did, but a gang of thieves stole it.
This was negligance on the part of the JRA... I have just rolled out over 8000 point of sale machines fitted with SIM cards... and during planning questions around "... what happens whens should the retailers staff start to pull the SIM cards out every night to make private calls..."
There are two options... and we are using both:
1) a. get the network to turn off voice capability so that the cards are data only
1) b. limit the data bill to R20 (about US$3) per month (which we calculated would be adequate for most transaction volumes)
2) migrate the SIM base to a private APN so that the SIMs become point to point VPN data SIMs (i.e. can only connect to our servers)
In the case of the JRA, the traffic lights had to be vandalised to get to the SIMs... so the cost to the city is going to be a lot more than just simply replacing the SIMs. In our case we did not care because we did not think that staff would vandalise their own terminals (it would be known who did it) and we deliberatly spread the word that the SIMs are useless for anything but what they were intended for because they were locked down to our private APN.
Why are you asking a traffic light manufacturer dude? No doubt he does know a thing or two about traffic in general, but you'd really want to talk to a (city) traffic engineer. These are the people who actually work out the signaling for given areas taking into account other areas, major highways, the time of day, behavior during rush hour, etc.
These do exist - but often a pre-programmed format works out better. Take for example an intersection of a busy through road and a residential road. On the residential road is you and your wife who just got married and you've got 20 other cars trailing you. The 'smart' signaling system sees the 10 cars and decides to give you more time at the intersection.. instead of letting ~8 cars pass, it's going to let you and the other 20 cars through. But now you've halted traffic on the through road for so long that the traffic light a block further back is already green again and cars are backing up into that intersection.
These also exist. There's tons of those where I live - there's just an induction loop in the road some hundred yards or so from the traffic lights. Now you might say "well 100 yards isn't enough if I'm cruising along at 35mph" - but keep in mind that just as -you- would like to see the traffic light magically change to green when it should 'know' the intersection is clear, there might be somebody in another car from a side direction thinking the exact same thing. So when you think the traffic signal is 'smart' and will give you a green by the time you hit the intersection, so will that person. That's a Bad Thing. That's why the loops are closer to the intersection here.. to make even drivers who are familiar with these intersections and 'know' they will get a green slow down enough to get a good overview of the intersection and be able to stop well in time just in case they do -not- get that green because somebody else did.
It's 2011 and we need smarter drivers more than we need smarter traffic lights :)
That said, there's certainly intersections that are on a completely fixed interval, going through 4 or even 7 directions in a cycle, and in the middle of the night you just have to wait and wait and wait wondering just who the heck the other directions' traffic lights are on green for. Just know that this is not for a lack of technology and capability - it's typically for a lack of the municipality/state/whoever wanting to pay.
We have, in my small town, one (1) intersection which works exactly as you describe. The default state of the light is green for the main drag, but if you approach on a side street at a reasonable speed the light will turn green before you get to the intersection (as long as there's no other traffic). These side-streets aren't ever particularly busy, so the light then (quite reasonably) goes back to default a few seconds after you've cleared it.
It uses cameras to detect traffic using some computer-vision wizardry*, which is increasingly common around here (NW Ohio).
We used to have an exchange with I75 which when exiting the interstate would consistently have a green light waiting for you at the top of the exit ramp. This was done using conventional inductive loops. They ruined that 10 years or so ago, while also deleting the dedicated right-turn-with-yield lanes. The interchange now consistently makes folks wait, no matter what direction they're going. I guess that's progress.
*: So far, that's the only thing the cameras are being used for. There's a lot of noise recently about installing some red light cameras here, but honestly, if every intersection behaved as sanely as described above there would hardly ever be a reason to run a red light, including inattentiveness. Make the yellow a bit longer to eliminate instances where people can't stop in time, whether due to weather or bad/inherently lousy brakes or whatever, and things would be far safer than a red light camera could ever make them.
Kid-proof tablet..
Well the link more accurately says the power failures are common in Johannesburg, and the missing SIM cards are from the lights in Johannesburg.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
It should be possible to triangulate where a phone is with a stolen simcard. If several cells don't overlap the phone at least you know the neighborhood.
Stealing sim cards is a no-brainer.
Triangulation isn't as easy as it sounds. First, to be accurate you'll need a minimum of three towers in range, and in real life application you probably will need closer to 5 or 6 to get a real-time fix on a location.
On paper triangulation is simple; draw three circles with radius equal to the signal strenght, and your intersection point is the origin. But this is an ideal case. In real life signal strength will vary quite a bit just by moving around or changing the direction of the antenna. So for each of those original three circles you really have to draw two circles; one representing the closest the phone could be with that strength, and another representing the furthest. Do this with all three circles, and it's the intersecting area which shows the location. However, this isn't a point, and especially in dense population areas the 'location' can easily encompass a large chunk of the city.
So if you're talking about finding someone on a wide-open flat grassy plain, then it's pretty simple. Get into a city with a lot of tall buildlings, landform variation, etc. and it's just not that easy to do. And even if you can get the location narrowed to within a few hundred yards, in many cities that can mean thousands of potential suspects.
Anybody know how to make those things trip if you're on a motorcycle?
Other alternatives (if you're waiting to make a left):
1. Waiting forever.
2. Make a right turn, a u-turn up the road, another right turn, a u-turn, and another right turn.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
That often doesn't matter in South Africa.
Lots of traffic lights (called "robots" over there) are often times out of commission, because people are stealing power cables for copper that they contain. If they go to trouble of getting into powered cables under ground do you really think a small thing like a lock is going to matter?
I work for a South African Construction Company as a SysAdmin and I have to say I was not surprised when I saw this. It is quite stupid when you consider that it is very simple and cost effective to arrange a private APN with the Cell Companies and link SIM cards to it so those sims act like VPN connections, only being able to connect to your network. We do it for about 200 people so how they didn't do something similar and used stock SIM cards I really do not know. Actually I do. There are a range of factors in South Africa that leads to stupid mistakes like this. Firstly there are the power failures. Poorly maintained infrastructure, poor capacity planning, the power is bound to go down even without the summer rain storms. Then you have the fact that Government will only give contracts to Companies with insanely high Black Economic Empowerment levels. You get different levels but to obtain the highest ones you basically have to be an all black company and by from all black suppliers. The problem is, and I know this from job hunting as well as recruiting, that there is a massive skills shortage in South Africa. It is very hard to find a capable IT Professional of any race, and 10 times as hard to find a black one to keep your HR department happy on their quotas. So what happens? You HAVE to employ a black person, but there isn't one with the skills you need so you employ the brightest looking one and train them yourself. But when you have an entire company filled with these types of recruitments there isn't anyone to train the rest. So you have a High Level BEE company that can tender for Government work but who do not really have a clue as to what they are doing. Add to this some bad apples that will leak this info to some shady friends and you have a situation like this. Strangely, I do not think this is not a JRA inside job. They just bought the system. This had to have been an inside job from the IT company that designed the system and knew the SIMs could be used for normal phone calls. Then again, that info could have been slipped to the JRA and the leaked out there. All and all this is what happens when you have a skills shortage in a country and then still try to force companies to employ only certain races regardless if they have the skills or not.
They did, but the CCTV was stolen...
Push the button at the crossing? This is South Africa you're talking about. The only pedestrians who push the button here seem to be the elderly and the disabled. The rest run across the road, even in the face of oncoming traffic.
You assume that trafficlights are to speed up the flow of traffic. This is common misunderstanding, 90% of the time the traffic flows better unregulated. This is a known fact.
Trafficlights are placed for safety, because as soon as you do have an incident on an intersection then traffic grinds to a halt very fast. Not to forget the cost of human life and all.
And then you have the busy road with a very low density turn, traffic coming from that turn has no chance to get on the busy road safely without trafficlights.
(I notice that more cities here start to disable the trafficlights at night, because of the low amounts of traffic and headlights they are not needed at those times)
In that case. Thanks for your money. And don't forget to keep wearing your tinfoil hat.