Posted on 04/19/2015 8:59:46 PM PDT by QT3.14
Chris Roberts, a prominent computer security expert, was aboard a United Airlines flight last week when he tweeted about a potential security flaw he found on the plane’s on-board Wi-Fi. Big mistake.
Airline personnel saw the tweet and alerted authorities at Syracuse Hancock International Airport where the flight was scheduled to land. Roberts exited the plane and was quickly detained by the FBI. Roberts, the founder and chief technical officer of the Denver security firm One World Labs, said the agents questioned him, confiscated several of his electronic devices, and then let him go. “Lesson from this evening, don't mention planes,” he later tweeted. “[T]he feds ARE listening, nice crew in Syracuse, left there naked of electronics.”
(Excerpt) Read more at ibtimes.com ...
The arrogance of nerds.
Perhaps he could have communicated this another way.
I am not a fan of the DHS, but sometimes slapping an idiot in the head isn’t horrible.
Do you understand how Twitter works?
Using public or free WiFi = no expectation of privacy. ...I think he just did a talk show and explained it...and the FBI could have sent out an alert and was discovered on the flight... is what I read last week
Or else, is it Uncle Sam doing it, who then calls the airline, and makes them act?
What he did is similar to crying “fire” in a theater. Not only that, he is flat out wrong. He preys on people’s fear that all technology can be turned against us, and that airlines, and aircraft manufacturers are unaware of any threat.
All of this has been so many times disproven - which is why he tried to make a name for himself. No one that knows anything will listen to him, so he decided to make a public scene knowing the public is more than gullible.
Life is good when you know you never have to take a plane again!
> What specific law did he violate?
Evidently none. Otherwise the FBI would have charged him.
UAL monitors all social media, just like every other large, public facing organization. #UAL or #UnitedAirlines was all it took.
He probably hashtagged the airline or sent it with an @... if you’re having a problem with a company or airline, you can usually get a quick reply from them by doing this. My daughter had her luggage lost and this is exactly what we did as it was taking far too long for her to be compensated.
Probably monitored on the ground, since everything on the large social media web sites is available to government snoops, and then they alerted the flight crew and the landing crew. And I guess it's better that we not know exactly how they monitor, since terrorists can set off explosives with cell phones. He was dumb not to take up the matter privately with the airline instead of "pointing and laughing" on the world wide web.
In other words, "fertilizer"? "Horse pucky"?
SHIA, eh? He should be glad he wasn't going to Southern Upper New Netherlands International or they would've blindfolded him and thrown him off the roof of the terminal.
Only that which was “chemically” detectable.
Is a Wifi vulnerability a threat to flight safety? I can’t see how it would be.
In recent weeks, Roberts gave media interviews in which he discussed airline system vulnerabilities. "Quite simply put, we can theorize on how to turn the engines off at 35,000 feet and not have any of those damn flashing lights go off in the cockpit," he told Fox News. Roberts also told CNN he was able to connect to a box under his seat at least a dozen times to view data from the aircraft's engines, fuel and flight-management systems.
Can you tell me in technical terms how you would monitor twitter in an automated fashion ?
I’m a programmer, tell me how you would write such a program.
If I were United Airlines, I would monitor the @UnitedAirlines (or whatever they use.) I would then report any threats (implied or direct) the the TSA.
No genius about it.
If you are flying and have a problem with your airline, tweet that you are getting screwed by @Delta, and see what happens. Last time it took about five minutes for a response.
This guy is an idiot. He’s lucky they only took his electronics.
Find myself on a 737/800, lets see Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM, ? Shall we start playing with EICAS messages? "PASS OXYGEN ON" Anyone ? :)
Now we see.
Uniteds normal twitter monitoring turned up the fact that this fellow was in flight and tweeting; given those recent interviews, rather than understand any details of the situation, they simply put him into the “possible threat” category.
It’s quite easy to make sure passenger wifi and the planes computers can’t talk to each other, it’s called physical separation.
The airplanes’ computers do send data packets back and forth to ground, as we all learned from 9/11 investigations. But while these communications must happen, they are not http protocol and should not be, obviously.
Many people either don’t understand or refuse to admit that IP networking simply is not designed fundamentally with security in mind, quite simply because once a packet is in transit between its source and destination, neither end has any way of knowing or ensuring anything about monitoring or integrity at the lower levels of IP protocol. This is all done in higher levels of IP protocol using checksums, encryption, etc., thus it’s an ongoing challenge.
Physical separation I would think would be the only way to go with something like vehicles of any kind. A moving vehicle should not have its internal computing that controls the vehicle accessible to the internet. It’s the only way to guarantee that a vehicle that is operating won’t be hacked; it physically can’t be.
I don’t know if this is the case with airplanes; I always assumed it was, that any passenger communications was physically isolated from the planes systems and the plane’s systems were not accessible on the internet through normal protocols.
If it is physically separate, and planes are not “hackable”, it may well be that the public is intentionally being made afraid by stories like this, when there is nothing to fear.
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