The San Francisco Transit Authority (SFTA) announced today that hackers were stealing electricity from the enroute charging stations for the City’s new electric bus fleet. The electric costs for the new charging stations were five times higher than expected during the first six months of operation according to a report released today by the SFTA. Johan Muir, a spokesperson for the SFTA reported that the federal grant supporting the e-charging system would only last another three months at this rate.
Brewster Zenneck, the Director of the City’s SF eBus System, explained this morning that the innovative new electric transit bus system was able to use smaller, lighter batteries to power their new busses because the city had installed cordless power charging stations at about half of the bus stops used by the new vehicles. This means that the busses could partially recharge their batteries while unloading and loading passengers.
Zenneck explained that the system uses inductive charging plates built into to road at the bus stop. When a bus stopped to pickup passengers, a device on the bus would signal the charging system to turn on and then turn off when the bus pulled away. The high-powered charging system would be able to provide enough electricity to the vehicles batteries to allow it to reach the next powered bus stop.
According to an article in last week’s Democratic Press, an alternative new site, not long after the EF-1 charging system was installed a free application appeared on some alternate power web sites that would operate the charging stations. These apps would allow users to charge electric vehicles equipped with cordless charging systems while parked on or near the bus stops. Other apps soon appeared that would allow cordless charging of smaller devices, including cell phones from the vehicle charging system.
Zenneck confirmed that the appearance of the apps had taken the SFTA by surprise. They were enabled by the hard-coded credentials used by the busses to control the charging stations. Once the SFTA had become aware of the problem they had worked with Robotron, the supplier of the EF-1 charging system, to update the system software to provide for unique passwords for each city vehicle that used the system.
Updates for the apps soon appeared on scene that were able to steal passwords from the vehicles when they powered on the system. Zenneck said that the SFTA was working with Robotron to solve that problem.
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