London Banter - View Single Post

sandy · November 20th 03, 06:08 PM posted to uk.transport.london

(Gareth Davis) wrote in message . com...
(sandy) wrote in message . com...

I leave the station and decide to take a bus. It's a DOO bus so it
has a card reader by the driver. I blip the card onto the reader, it
lights up green, the driver acknowledges the fare and I make my
journey. I go into another tube station to check what has happened on
the card's journey history; bus fare deducted 1p, balance £2.49. I
did the same again later that evening from my local tube station to
home so the first journey was clearly not an isolated incident. This
happened about a week ago and checking the journey history yesterday
indicates that LU haven't adjusted the balance on the card to deduct
the bus fares at their proper amount.

This is very worrying. If there isn't sufficent audit carried out to
spot this problem then they have not got a hope in hell of spotting
hacked Oyster cards. Automated processes should be trawling through
the reader events every day and flagging any cards with suspect
transactions. This will reduce the life of any hacked card to less
than 24 hours. The longer the period is between the checks then the
longer the period that a hacked card will be useful for. Apparently
this stands at one week and rising.

At least it is taking some money off of you though, which was better
than the older magnetic ticketing system which would under certain
circumstances open the barriers when fed an expired travelcard (I jest
not - Google has the details). Nice to see that Cubic have produced
another quality system with our millions.

I think that this isn't a security fault as such, but rather a
bug/"feature" of a system that hasn't become fully operational yet. I
do wonder why the bus oyster readers simply aren't set up to reject
prepay cards as the tube gate readers are.

--
-sandy