Major London Rail Station System Passwords Revealed In TV Documentary

Security in the digital world can be a particularly sticky subject – and regardless of what you hear, there is no 100% foolproof way of ensuring that a particular digital system is truly secure and failsafe. It simply does not work that way, although cracking some systems can be a really tough job, but not impossible. In one of the more recent events concerning security, it looks as though system passwords at one of London’s busiest railway stations have been shown off in a BBC documentary, where that sensitive list was printed and attached to the top of a station controller’s monitor.

These unique login credentials happen to be visible right before the 44 minute minute mark in the documentary Nick and Margaret: The Trouble With our Trains. There is also a cropped screen capture of the offending monitor with the machine-produced login which has appeared online, and it does seem to point to a particular workstation on a signaller’s control desk‬ that looks as though it is running the kind of software which controls signals and trains over‪ the final approach to Waterloo station‬. ‪

It would go without saying that a switch in passwords is long overdue, and I am quite sure that something has already been done about the situation to correct it. Ah well, this just goes to show that we are only human, and with the responsibility of remembering so many personal passwords on our own already, it adds more strain when you have to remember the passwords of others.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: password