Oyster card hacked – details being published in October. Free travel for all!
The Oyster system could go into meltdown this October, after a court ruling found it’s OK for details of its security failures to be made public.
NXP, the company behind the Oyster technology, had applied for an injunction against a group of Dutch technology experts, who worked out how to hack Oyster cards back in June. The judge has now overturned this injunction, so the Dutch hacking masters (Prof Bart Jacobs and his team from Radboud University) have said they’ll go public with the data in October – giving NXP enough time to, hopefully, come up with a fix.
NXP says it may take “months or years” for some Oyster-using companies to implement security upgrades – although Transport for London says it’ll be able to ban hacked cards within 24 hours. So don’t mentally allocate your travel savings elsewhere just yet.
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