Thieves in South Africa Hit Traffic Lights For SIM Cards 181
arisvega writes "Some 400 high-tech South African traffic lights are out of action after thieves in Johannesburg stole the mobile phone SIM cards they contain. JRA (Johannesburg Road Agency) said it is investigating the possibility of an 'inside job' after only the SIM card-fitted traffic lights were targeted. The cards were fitted to notify JRA when the traffic lights were faulty. 'We have 2,000 major intersections in Johannesburg and only 600 of those were fitted with the cards,' the agency's spokesperson Thulani Makhubela told the BBC. 'No-one apart from JRA and our supplier knows which intersections have that system.' The thieves ran up bills amounting to thousands of dollars by using the stolen cards to make calls."
Re:STO, really, again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. And it works most of the time.
Security in the world of road side traffic systems is almost none existent. It's simply not a priority. You cannot pull of a "all green chaos attack" as in "the italian job" (safety systems protect unsafe situations), but you can cause major gridlock with ease if you know what you are doing.
We fit a lot of our systems with wireless GSM, it's pretty cheap but not that reliable. However, we arrange it so you cannot use those sims for calling, only GPRS/UMTS/3G connections to a private network.
(I could tell a thing or 2 about the speed camera's we produce, but that would break my NDA I guess)
Re:Why have GSM cell? fiber / wifi / microwave / e (Score:5, Interesting)
The cost of GSM data isn't very high when all you're sending is "help I'm not working correctly". Since the link serves no other purpose, four bytes should be enough to send a basic diagnostic code.
SIM cards cost about ten cents, basic GSM hardware maybe a few dollars, and I think it's safe to assume all the poles are on a shared data plan.
Wouldn't the GSM antennas have been a hint ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't it possible that the thieves worked this out, and only targeted the lights with the antennas ?
Re:STO, really, again? (Score:2, Interesting)
It should be possible to triangulate where a phone is with a stolen simcard. If several cells don't overlap the phone at least you know the neighborhood.
Stealing sim cards is a no-brainer.
Triangulation isn't as easy as it sounds. First, to be accurate you'll need a minimum of three towers in range, and in real life application you probably will need closer to 5 or 6 to get a real-time fix on a location.
On paper triangulation is simple; draw three circles with radius equal to the signal strenght, and your intersection point is the origin. But this is an ideal case. In real life signal strength will vary quite a bit just by moving around or changing the direction of the antenna. So for each of those original three circles you really have to draw two circles; one representing the closest the phone could be with that strength, and another representing the furthest. Do this with all three circles, and it's the intersecting area which shows the location. However, this isn't a point, and especially in dense population areas the 'location' can easily encompass a large chunk of the city.
So if you're talking about finding someone on a wide-open flat grassy plain, then it's pretty simple. Get into a city with a lot of tall buildlings, landform variation, etc. and it's just not that easy to do. And even if you can get the location narrowed to within a few hundred yards, in many cities that can mean thousands of potential suspects.
Re:STO, really, again? (Score:4, Interesting)
That often doesn't matter in South Africa.
Lots of traffic lights (called "robots" over there) are often times out of commission, because people are stealing power cables for copper that they contain. If they go to trouble of getting into powered cables under ground do you really think a small thing like a lock is going to matter?
BEE hard at work (Score:5, Interesting)