Author Topic: How Evil Hackers Can Cause Chaos At Horribly Vulnerable Car Parks  (Read 2314 times)

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Offline The Bald Eagle

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And the BPA Ltd want MORE use of technology.

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/05/15/super-easy-car-park-hacking/

How Evil Hackers Can Cause Chaos At Horribly Vulnerable Car Parks

There’s been growing interest in car hacking in recent years, inspired by researchers showing off exploits in real vehicles, tinkering with Teslas, and uncovering glaring vulnerabilities in third party kit. But criminal hackers could vex drivers in other ways, such as compromising internet-connected, easily hackable parking management systems, according to Spanish researcher Jose Guasch. At the Hack In The Box security conference in Amsterdam later this month, he will present some shocking weaknesses in as yet unnamed parking software, which he claims could be abused to take control of car parks, including their physical barriers and displays, or steal driver credit card data and personal details, or acquire free parking spaces.

It’s been a strange labor of love for Guasch, technical coordinator of the Tiger Team at Spanish consulting firm SIA Group and an editor at SecurityByDefault.com, who has been looking into the security of car park software since 2013. When he came across the gaping security holes in the vendor software in June 2014, he contacted the Spanish branch, but to no avail. Further attempts to warn the provider in February 2015 also elicited no response. That’s despite his warnings he could access credit card data from compromising the software’s remote access tool, just by searching the tickets folder. But he still won’t name the developers responsible.

“There are some vulnerabilities that are so easy to exploit and have such a deep impact, it could compromise certain people and credit cards and personal information, so I’m keeping that secret,” he told FORBES. The first vulnerability he found was a shocker: a publicly accessible, unprotected folder containing daily database backups for the current month, which contained client and ticket data. Anybody could access it without any username or password.

He then found a “path traversal vulnerability”, allowing an attacker to easily grab all data from the parking management system server in the new version by learning the structure of the file system. Guasch found it possible to predict the full path to a backups file, meaning he could fetch all historical database information for the whole system. Though exploiting this weakness could only be achieved by a logged-in user, he managed to find a handful accounts that were used across different versions the software, with default and “very predictable” passwords. Typically, default passwords are ”admin”, “root”, or other easily guessable terms.



Guasch now believes he could create a tool to quickly compromise every other parking system run by the vendor that was accessible over the web. That leaves around 180 vulnerable car parks at the time of writing, mostly situated across Germany and the UK, according to Guasch. Once inside, an attacker with more malicious intent than the Madrid-based researcher could install malware on the system to harvest credit card data, or licence plate information. Or they could just have fun with the barriers and “occupied” signs to thoroughly ruin drivers’ days.

Attacks on car park companies have become more frequent in recent months. Investigative security reporter Brian Krebs has uncovered a range of breaches at Book2Park.com, Park ‘N Fly and OneStopParking.com, who all provide airport car parking services. According to Krebs, the hackers responsible for breaching Target and Home Depot were responsible.

Only the CEO of the Hack In The Box conference, Dhillon Kannabhiran knows the name of the vendor affected by Guasch’s findings. He believes the research has highlighted yet again the difficulties associated with warning vendors about their software’s shortcomings and the potentially grave impact on customers. “I guess it goes to show that even with ‘good intentions’, it’s not always easy or so cut and dried when it comes to getting bugs fixed and sometimes the manufacturer themselves don’t see the ‘need’ to,” Kannabhiran told FORBES.

Given the rise of “smart cities”, where the web sprawls into areas previously untouched by the internet, more and more parking lots will be run by internet-hosted software. Where the right protections aren’t in place, as is the case in Guasch’s research, drivers have more urgent concerns than being knocked off the road by a remote hacker.
WE ARE WATCHING YOU

Offline Ewan Hoosami

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Re: How Evil Hackers Can Cause Chaos At Horribly Vulnerable Car Parks
« Reply #1 on: 16 May, 2015, 08:24:23 PM »
Sadly, you don't need to be a hacker to get sensitive information from BPA Ltd members,

http://nutsville.com/2013/03/31/british-parking-association-member-ukpc-in-epic-data-protection-failure/

And so that non computer savvy fraudsters don't feel left out, NSL Ltd will simply mail all the data to you,

http://notomob.co.uk/discussions/index.php/topic,5302.msg32845.html#msg32845

The eternally pig-ignorant BPA Ltd also want their special brand of incompetence to become a recognised profession.
Appealing to the council is like playing chess with a pigeon. You might be a chess grand master but the pigeon will always knock all the pieces over, shit on the board and then strut around triumphantly.

 


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