OK, I'll bite
So how did they come to focus on Lin?
Taiwan cops say student's radio kit brought bullet trains to a standstill
A university student in Taiwan is out on bail after being accused of interfering with signals sent to the country's high-speed rail network, bringing trains to a halt. In a statement issued to local media, Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSR) confirmed that a 48-minute disruption to three trains on April 5 was caused by a rogue General …
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Wednesday 6th May 2026 20:28 GMT bazza
Re: OK, I'll bite
Probably looked up sales of SDRs and such like in the locality, and went from there on.
Assuming that this is no more than student curiosity, and creative way to deal with this would be to set him to work in their Electronic Warfare R&D for their military, pay him to do it professionally.
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Thursday 7th May 2026 07:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: OK, I'll bite
If only.
My entire life, that has been essentially impossible if you don't have a degree and haven't proposed some bullshit research paper that has no bearing on real world cybersecurity...because as we know, all the best hackers that ever lived didn't know anything until they were 25 and fully qualified. None of them were talented and messed around in their early teens causing mayhem for lulz because there was nothing else they could do with their skills and free time.
The devil and idle hands and all that.
It's weird because it's the one form of youthful exploration and vandalism that hasn't had the obvious treatment.
We don't want teenage skateboarders in shopping centres etc...we eventually built skate parks.
We wanted to cut down on teenage graffiti etc...so eventually we built up designated areas for street art.
We don't want teenage hackers causing mayhem...we build nothing?
Sounds like we need locally funded hacker spaces for young people to me. Somewhere to practice these things safely and encourage it rather than criminalise and be frightened of it.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'd feel a lot safer with a controlled environment to develop these skills and a local troop of teenage hackers properly testing everything in the area under the guidance of a proper mentor or two.
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Thursday 7th May 2026 09:40 GMT Berny Stapleton
While he replayed something that he recorded on air, is it possible that he didn't know what it was that he replayed? Was he just replaying a bitstream that he thought was a logon signal? Or did he replay the general alarm just for shiggles to see if it would work? Or because he thought he wasn't going to get caught?
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Wednesday 6th May 2026 14:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Impressive radio kit....
Please reread the article. The radio interference was from "a university student in Taiwan" and caused problems with the Taiwanese train systems, specifically at Taichung Station (located in Taichung City, Taiwan). According to Wikipedia, there are 17 universities in Taichung City.
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Thursday 7th May 2026 06:33 GMT katrinab
Re: Impressive radio kit....
We do have the fastest steam train [LNER Class A4 4468 Mallard], the fastest diesel train [BR Class 43 / Intercity 125], the fastest conventional rail airport express [Heathrow Express Class 387/1a], and the fastest slow train [GWR Class 387/1 between Paddington and Didcot/Newbury].
We also have the fastest average speed.
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Thursday 7th May 2026 12:14 GMT JimboSmith
Re: Impressive radio kit....
We do have the fastest steam train [LNER Class A4 4468 Mallard], the fastest diesel train [BR Class 43 / Intercity 125], the fastest conventional rail airport express [Heathrow Express Class 387/1a], and the fastest slow train [GWR Class 387/1 between Paddington and Didcot/Newbury].
We also have the fastest average speed.
And the most uncomfortable seats, on the GWR Class 800! My advice is to take a cushion to sit on.
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Friday 8th May 2026 21:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Impressive radio kit....
Which is why you have a yellow (aka. distant) signal, to inform the driver the next signal is red and thus be prepared (ie slow to appropriate speed) in order to stop when you have visual of the red signal.
Or two yellows, to tell the driver the next signal is yellow (and thus the one after that is red), to allow the train to decelerate from high speed in time.
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Wednesday 6th May 2026 14:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
If one student can exploit this, then China can too.
National defense isn't all about missiles and tanks.
With invasion concerns ramping up, and 2027-2028 seen as a critical window, Taiwan needs to be auditing and hardening every electronic system which civil society relies upon.
They may not have much time. Seems like time for a whole-of-government cybersecurity blitz.
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Friday 8th May 2026 15:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: If one student can exploit this, then China can too.
Yeah I do.
Outside policy wonk circles, the terms "China" and "Taiwan" are clearly understood, especially when speaking to an international audience, not all of whom count English as their first language. Helps to draw clear distinctions, like here, when an island nation which wants to be left alone and prosper faces cyber threats from a mainland nation which threatens it with coercion and force.
If you want to start drawing distinctions between the "People's Republic of China" and the "Republic of China" you're going to confuse a lot of people who think the latter is merely a shortened version of the former.
When "China" is shorthand for "Mainland China" (PRC), the term "Taiwan" makes it pretty clear that said island is NOT part of the mainland and maintains a distinct identity and government. Nor is it a Special Administrative Region, a territory, or any other description which denies the recognition of its full sovereignty.
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Wednesday 6th May 2026 17:26 GMT Martin an gof
TETRA
While railways in the UK use GSM-R, blue-light services are still using TETRA (search El Reg for plenty of info on why, for example, this). I wonder how this would play out in (say) London, if a general alarm was sent to every Bobby, paramedic and Fireman Sam?
M.
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Thursday 7th May 2026 02:07 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: TETRA
> Government TETRA deployments use both air interface and end-to-end encryption
I assume that Police / Fire / Ambulance / Transport police all use different incompatible encryption and they aren't compatible with talking to "civilian" systems like the people running the railways and telling the trains to stop
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Wednesday 6th May 2026 19:44 GMT kahara
> Officials said they believe the way Lin allegedly triggered the General Alarm was rudimentary and involved cloning signals using equipment he bought online.
I'm not an expert™, but that doesn't quite add up imo. If the hack was as rudimentary as is implied, were these GA messages flying around regularly so that our antagonist was able to catch and replay one? Or was it perhaps a bit more involved than what "cloning signals" would lead one to believe.
Also, what exactly is an "SDR filter".
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Wednesday 6th May 2026 20:38 GMT bazza
Who knows. Likely it amounted to nothing more than corruption of the protocol stack, and a reasonable response for such devices when they realise that the radio network is borked would be to assume the worst. A "general alarm" sounds like it could fit into that kind of scenario.
A replay of a bit of recorded signal could easily (to the rest of the network) look like one base station is seriously out of sync. Quite a lot of cellular or cellular-esque networks are highly dependent on timing consistency across the whole network to be able to operate and quickly get into trouble when that's not true. This is one of the many reasons to worry about potential loss of GPS, which could bork mobile comms pretty quickly.
An SDR filter is an odd turn of phrase, but one can do filtering digitally if one wishes to.
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Wednesday 6th May 2026 22:23 GMT doublelayer
According to the Bleeping Computer article someone else referred to, the part that was cloned was the identifying information of a radio, allowing the student to masquerade his transmissions as from that unit. The actual message was built from reverse engineering and "a 21-year-old accomplice [who] provided Lin with some critical THSR parameters", so it wasn't a complete replay attack. Still not a good setup if it's that easy to forge messages.
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Thursday 7th May 2026 11:08 GMT BOFH in Training
And bleeping computer link says the following :
Reports state that the system had been in use for 19 years and that its parameters were apparently not rotated during that time, allowing the hacker to bypass seven verification layers.
So they did not rotate keys or whatever for 19 years and it allowed him to bypass 7 verification (security?) layers.
Sounds like the train people are at fault as well, for not doing at least basic proper security.
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Thursday 7th May 2026 14:58 GMT JWLong
Taiwan cops say student's radio kit brought bullet trains to a standstill
>>Also, what exactly is an "SDR filter"<<
SDR is "Software Defined Radio".
You can buy a USB blob and with SDR software you can pretty much tune any frequency that's recievable.
I have it to listen to shortwave on my laptop from all over, it's an old habit I got from my dad back in the early sixties(he was a ham radio junky).
https://www.google.com/search?q=sdr+reciever
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Friday 8th May 2026 00:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Taiwan cops say student's radio kit brought bullet trains to a standstill
> SDR is "Software Defined Radio".
Bravo Sherlock. The question was "what is an SDR filter" and, indeed, it's a pretty good question.
To anybody thinking of writing: "it's a software defined radio filter, dude!", I can see that coming from half a parsec away.
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Thursday 7th May 2026 14:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Just read this article....
Really ? So they no longer have those lights next to the track that show a red light where they want trains to stop ?
The "safety critical so all trains had to stop" doesn't add up if you have a clue about safety critical systems. An important system, yes; "safety critical", hard to accept at face value. But it does mean that a hostile actor now knows that all they need to do is jam GSM-R (which I suspect is probably almost trivial to do if yo know a little about the systems) and create a widespread denial of service to the entire rail system.
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Thursday 7th May 2026 21:49 GMT Martin an gof
Re: Just read this article....
It's not as simple as that.
In the UK nearly all lines still have coloured lights (or even semaphores) for signalling and GSM-R is mostly just communication, however a few lines, notably the Cambrian through mid Wales (which has been used as a test bed for various "levels" of signalling), HS-1 (I think) and parts of Crossrail – the Elizabeth Line – do use ETCS, which is much, much more than just radio control.
As for one command to stop all trains, not sure what is meant by "all trains" but obviously if one train stops, all the trains behind it on the same track must also stop.
M.
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Saturday 9th May 2026 09:32 GMT Martin an gof
Re: Just read this article....
Ok then, re-phrase. Obviously, if a train has to stop, the trains behind can't proceed very far until it moves. Simplistically, I suppose, they might close up to the minimum allowed separation before being stopped. Traditionally this would be at a lineside signal, though if the signallers have enough options they might try to park as many as possible at platforms so that passengers are not stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Reminds me of the case a few years ago where even though traction power was never removed, issues in the East of England caused grid frequency to drop. Some trains had incorrectly set protection which caused them to stop on track. Some of those had recently had a software update which made it impossible for the driver to clear the fault by "switching it off and on again". Engineers with laptops had to travel to each of them to reset before any trains, including those reset by drivers and those not affected in the first place could move. Thus a grid problem which was fully cleared within 15 minutes turned in to several hours of delays on the trains.
M.
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Friday 8th May 2026 21:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Just read this article....
The first UK line to have radio signalling was the West Highland line, Glasgow - Oban/Fort William/Mallaig in the late 80's. Long before Harry Potter was a twinkle in the eye of JKR, steam specials were operated on that line. I used to know one of the guys who were tasked with fitting 12 volt DC radios to a steam engine/loco. Think about it.... what kind of electrics were fitted to steam cabs back in the day? Now how do you find a reliable and permanent 12 V supply for the radio? No radio, no access to track.
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Sunday 10th May 2026 21:32 GMT MachDiamond
"How long before they blame the HS2 delays on him or his like as well?"
The most modern trains are starting to be fitted with satellite comms. For signalling, there isn't much bandwidth required and other than in tunnels, a train can have a line of sight view of the sats which can be easier to manage than trying to get terrestrial radio to work in heavy terrain.
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