At the tender age of 14, a group of young AV-team geeks discovered the computer system which controlled their school's automated message board. Passersby on Milwaukee's Highway 100 were amused to discover that, in addition to the time and temperature, students at the parochial school were being held hostage in the basement, classes were cancelled the next week due to a cockroach infestation, and that tuition for the Fall 1993 semester was currently on a two-for-one sale. The students were given citations and suspended for three days. I put that citation in a magnetic frame and kept it attached to the inside of my locker door.
A similar sense of latent geek pride surround news that, using off-the-shelf components, security engineers were able to transmit false information to BMWs equipped with satellite navigation systems, rerouting drivers because of random bullfights, parades and, in one instance, a terrorist attack. The hack uses RDS data, which piggybacks every FM channel and contains song information as well as traffic alerts. RDS streams are unencrypted and unauthenticated, leaving a backdoor large enough to push a fake airliner crash through.
There's no planned fix for the exploit, since the protocol standards are already in place and most sat-nav hardware is proprietary, so drivers are advised to not "freak out immediately" and instead "listen to the news on the radio to get confirmation".
Read Article