In 2008, Boston’s transit authority sued to stop MIT hackers from presenting at the Defcon hacker conference on how to get free subway rides. Today, four teens picked up where they left off.
It’s nice to see the MBTA being a bit more modern with their approach to security breaches. The overly hostile “We’ll sue you if you tell anyone” tactic certainly would not encourage anyone to report anything they found so it could be fixed.
This is the ideal response to a system threat of this type, especially if they didn’t know the vulnerability existed.
“It should be noted that the vulnerability identified by the students does NOT pose an imminent risk affecting safety, system disruption, or a data breach,” Pesaturo added.
That may be one of the most adult things ever said by an organization executive. Since they have a replacement system (hopefully more secure) in the works and they’ve used the data from he hackers to mitigate potential financial impacts to the system in the mean time, they’re being completely level-headed about the process. It’s a damned shame this doesn’t happen more often.
It’s nice to see the MBTA being a bit more modern with their approach to security breaches. The overly hostile “We’ll sue you if you tell anyone” tactic certainly would not encourage anyone to report anything they found so it could be fixed.
This is the ideal response to a system threat of this type, especially if they didn’t know the vulnerability existed.
That may be one of the most adult things ever said by an organization executive. Since they have a replacement system (hopefully more secure) in the works and they’ve used the data from he hackers to mitigate potential financial impacts to the system in the mean time, they’re being completely level-headed about the process. It’s a damned shame this doesn’t happen more often.