In early August of 2008, virtually precisely 15 years in the past, the Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas was hit with one of many worst scandals in its history. Just earlier than a bunch of MIT college students deliberate to present a chat on the convention a few technique they’d discovered to get free rides on Boston’s subway system—often known as the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority—the MBTA sued them and obtained a restraining order to stop them from talking. The speak was canceled, however not earlier than the hackers’ slides have been broadly distributed to convention attendees and printed online.

In the summer season of 2021, 15-year-olds Matty Harris and Zachary Bertocchi have been driving the Boston subway when Harris advised Bertocchi a few Wikipedia article he’d learn that talked about this second in hacker historical past. The two youngsters, each college students at Medford Vocational Technical High School in Boston, started musing about whether or not they may replicate the MIT hackers’ work, and possibly even get free subway rides.

They figured it needed to be inconceivable. “We assumed that because that was more than a decade earlier, and it had got heavy publicity, that they would have fixed it,” Harris says.

Bertocchi skips to the tip of the story: “They didn’t.”

Now, after two years of labor, that pair of teenagers and two fellow hacker mates, Noah Gibson and Scott Campbell, have introduced the outcomes of their analysis on the Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas. In truth, they not solely replicated the MIT hackers’ 2008 methods, however took them a step additional. The 2008 group had hacked Boston’s Charle Ticket magstripe paper playing cards to repeat them, change their worth, and get free rides—however these playing cards went out of fee in 2021. So the 4 teenagers prolonged different analysis carried out by the 2008 hacker group to totally reverse engineer the CharlieCard, the RFID touchless sensible playing cards the MBTA makes use of right this moment. The hackers can now add any sum of money to one among these playing cards or invisibly designate it a reduced scholar card, a senior card, and even an MBTA worker card that offers limitless free rides. “You name it, we can make it,” says Campbell.