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Anatomy of a Subway Hack

This is an admitted BPM non sequitur, but it is important enough that I felt we needed to cover it here. Tonight a friend of mine, having just returned from DEFCON 16 (the Bohemian Grove of the hacker elite) shared with me the infamous presentation by a group of MIT students entitled “Anatomy of a Subway Hack.”

I will not go into too much detail here and instead defer to the outstanding slides – a must see for anyone with a cursory interest security, network vulnerability, fellow taxpayers to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and everyone in between. God bless RJ Ryan, Zack Anderson, and Alessandro Chiesa! In the interest of maintaining plausible deniability, that is as political as I will get here.

Although I will offer two other comments. First is that transparency is the remedy, not the enemy, of vulnerability. And the other is that MBTA chief Dan Grabauskas, someone I have known for nearly a decade and consider a true friend, is a process hero and transformation rock star. He is one of the good guys. Unfortunately, he has been put in a situation that has led him to contradict much of what he should be genuinely celebrated for. But these students are true patriots and have earned my utmost respect.

See the presentation here

[NOTE: if the link doesn't work, cut-and-paste http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf]