MIT students hacked subway card: free rides!

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has obtained a temporary restraining order barring three Massachusetts Institute of Technology students from showing what they claim is a way to get “free subway rides for life. ”The 10-day injunction, ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Douglas Woodlock, prohibited Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Allessandro Chiesa from revealing what they claim are the vulnerabilities of the MBTA’s fare card. The students claimed they had hacked the security features of the computerized “Charlie Card” and were scheduled to present their findings Sunday in Las Vegas at computer hacking conference.

“The Anatomy of a Subway Hack,” is the description of their presentation on the DEFCON 16 conference Web site.“In this talk we go over weaknesses in common subway fare collection systems. We focus on the Boston T subway, and we present several attacks to completely break the Charlie Card,” the listing read. The DEFCON 16 conference annually brings thousands of sophisticated hackers and technology security experts together. “If what the MIT undergrads claim in their public announcements is true, public disclosure of the security flaws – before the MBTA and its system vendors have an opportunity to correct the flaws – will cause significant damage to the MBTA’s transit system,” MBTA attorneys wrote in their motion for the restraining order. Anderson said the students never planned to show the public how to hack into the MBTA fare system.

Source: Boston Channel, Martin

MIT student visualizing malware and viruses! Niceee…

Cyber threats like NetSky, Mydoom and Parite are the bane of IT departments around the globe, but artist Alex Dragulescu has found subtle beauty deep within the dangerous computer code that can bring down networks and bombard e-mail inboxes with murderous spam. Dragulescu has peeled back the code behind the world’s worst tech bugs and rendered stunning images from it. The Romanian-born MIT researcher and artist was commissioned to do fashion the artwork by MessageLabs, a computer security company that sought to put a face — or at least a shape — on computer viruses.

Dragulescu found interesting, recurring patterns. “These types of threats are very smart. Very intelligent in design. Digital organisms, really, that adapt themselves and replicate. We wanted to capture some of that complexity and uniqueness.” The process of creating the art was like none other. MessageLabs carefully sent Dragulescu the once-harmful files after modifying them so his computers would not contract the viruses. Dragulescu looked for the frequency of certain occurrences in a virus, such as particular network sockets that it was designed to compromise. He fed the resulting data into a program he created with an algorithm to grow the viruses and Trojans visually. Dragulescu’s next project will be creating abstract portraits of people based on the contents of their blogs and the types of online communities they inhabit.

Source: AP, Wired