Jack Burnham
China’s reach into critical infrastructure threatens to disrupt Europeans’ daily commute. On November 19, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Oslo transportation authority, working in conjunction with Norwegian officials, discovered that the city’s Chinese-manufactured buses could be remotely disabled via a software vulnerability. Following the Norwegian study, both United Kingdom and Danish authorities announced their own investigations into their bus fleets.
The discovery, which follows earlier warnings over the presence of possible backdoors to Chinese-built devices embedded within European infrastructure, highlights Beijing’s unprecedented access to allied critical infrastructure.
Norway’s Test Proves Chinese Buses Could Be Disabled Remotely
In seeking to pinpoint the vulnerability, Oslo’s transit agency, Ruter, drove both a newly purchased Chinese-made Yutong bus and an older Dutch transit bus deep into a decommissioned mine to eliminate external signals. Once parked away from potential interference, Norwegian cybersecurity experts demonstrated that the Yutong bus’s battery and power systems, which can receive updates over the air, would theoretically allow the manufacturer to disable the vehicle remotely. In contrast, the older Dutch-made bus had no over-the-air update capability, preventing malicious actors from using external access points to sabotage its systems.
No comments:
Post a Comment