London Ninja

Public transportation in London are amongst some of the most expensive in the world. If you do not use an Oyster card, you could very well pay like 4 quid a ride for a single pass. I remember when Agenda visited me in London last year where I was certain it was a mistake. How could you be charged 4 quid to go from one end of a town to the other? Well, sure enough…it was correct. Bloody hell. The Oyster card does make things better by about half, but it is still very expensive compared to say New York or San Francisco.

So… when things are too expensive, what do you do? Well, you hack it, of course. Apparently some Dutch security researchers have figured out how to hack Oyster cards and will be publishing it in October. I would assume that there will have been a patch applied to the system by then but once you get a compromise to one of these massively deployed systems, it will probably be pretty quick when hackers get around that patch. It’s like any of your gaming consoles, DirecTV or any other type of protection systems…you can only hold off the hackers for so long before chaos ensues.