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 [wired.com]. 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.