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posted by takyon on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the hacked-board dept.

Healey, who works on security for payments company Stripe, teamed up with fellow researcher Mike Ryan, who works on security for E-Bay, to examine his and other electric skateboards to see if they could be hacked. The result is an exploit they developed called FacePlant that can give them complete control of someone's digital board.

"[The attack] is basically a synthetic version of the same RF noise [at that intersection in Melbourne]," he says, and allows them to cold stop a board or send it flying in reverse, tossing the rider in either case.

They plan to present their findings Saturday at the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas.

takyon: The researchers tested three skateboards and found vulnerabilities in each. They completed an exploit for a $1500 American-made "Boosted" board, and are working on an exploit for a $700 board called E-Go made by China-based firm Yuneec.


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  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday August 04 2015, @09:16PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @09:16PM (#218135) Homepage

    [The attack] is basically a synthetic version of the same RF noise [at that intersection in Melbourne]

    The missing information is from the opening paragraphs of the article:

    Richo Healey was riding his electric skateboard toward an intersection in Melbourne, Australia, last year when suddenly the board cold-stopped beneath him and tossed him to the street. He couldn’t control the board and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. There was no obvious mechanical defect, so being a computer security engineer, his mind naturally flew to other scenarios: could he have been hacked?

    It didn’t take long to determine that Bluetooth noise in the neighborhood was the likely culprit.

    Also from the article:

    a nearby attacker can easily insert himself

    Eww.

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