Communications of the ACM
In Australia, Hacked Lime Scooters Spew Racism, Profanity
Vandals hacked the audio files of scooters from international electronic-scooter company Lime in Australia, to make them generate profanities and racist speech.
Credit: Benoit Tessier/Reuters
Vandals hacked the audio files of scooters from international electronic-scooter company Lime in Australia, to make them generate profanities and racist speech.
The incident, involving eight scooters in Brisbane, followed more serious hacks of the vehicles' operating system (OS).
According to Lime, modifying the OS requires intimate knowledge of its software and engineering, which only a handful people currently possess; the vandals in this case physically broke into a scooter’s audio file port.
However, some experts are concerned infecting e-scooter OSes holds the potential to put riders in lethal danger. They warn of scenarios in which someone using a Bluetooth-enabled app from nearly 330 feet away could lock a scooter or deploy malware that hijacks the device or targets an individual rider, causing the scooter to unexpectedly brake or speed up.
From The Washington Post
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Abstracts Copyright © 2019 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA
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