The Ham Radio two point zero audio podcast rip. Thank you for downloading and listening to this podcast. So basically what I do is I take all the audio clips out of my videos and upload them to speaker and then from there they're spread out to iTunes and SoundCloud and now Amazon Audible as well. But I want to welcome you and thank you for joining the audio section of this
series on Ham Radio. I hope you enjoy it, and I would appreciate you leaving us a comment or review on whatever podcast service you're listening from. Thank you. In seventy three, hope you enjoy it. In Poland, two men were arrested for using radios to interfere with their mass transit train system. And the art dead and say what radio they used? But I wonder if you guys could guess this. So I love these new story articles that have anything to do with radio. I do HAM Radio, GMRS radio,
CB radio. This one doesn't specify what type of radio was used. It just says two polishmen arrested for radio hack that disrupts trains. This is on Wired dot com, okay, and I will share the link in the description blow so you guys can go read more about this. The top part of the article talks about a cyber attack, cryptocurrency, et cetera, et cetera, and then it starts right here. Last weekend, someone more on that
later successfully disrupted more than twenty trains in Poland. The incidents were originally described as a cyber attack, but it actually was something much simpler, a radio hack. We're not high tech here, guys, using equipment that can cost as little as thirty dollars. Hint, hint. The attack exploited the train's unencrypted radio system to cause them to perform an emergency stop. When more than twenty trains in Pulland were brought to a halt last weekend in what was described
as a cyber attack, all eyes turned to Russia. After all, Poland's rails serve as a key piece of infrastructure for supporting Ukraine's war effort. But as we reported a day later, the disruption had been caused not through any sophisticated cyber intrusion, but through a simple radio hack that sent a radio stop command, probably a DTMF tone I would guess to the Polish trains over an
unencrypted and unauthenticated system. So, in other words, they don't have encryption, and unauthenticated means that your radio doesn't have to register with their network in order to key up and be recognized by the system. The frequencies are known, the tones are known, the equipment is cheap. Polish speaking cybersecurity researcher lukaz olanjenk I know I'm saying that wrong. Apologies. Told Wired everybody could do this, even teenagers trolling. Okay, not teenagers exactly, but twenty
septhings. This week, Polish police arrested a twenty four year old man and a twenty nine year old man, both Polish citizens, who had allegedly carried out a radio train hack. One of the two men, based in the city of bialis Stock near the border of Belarus, was a police officer. One of the two men was a police officer whoa amateur radio equipment was found in one of their apartments, according to Poland's RMF radio, where the younger
man was found reportedly in a drunken state. I probably would blame a couple of guys I know for this, but they're not in Poland right now, so we'll just kind of bypass that. The motives for the two men's trains. Sabotage is still far from clear, especially given that between the radio stop commands, they also broadcasted the Russian national anthem and a clip of a speech
by President Vladimir Putin. It's too whilar to roll out Russian government involvement, but it's also very possible that the hack was an extremely ill advised political statement or prank. Thirty dollars radio that's easily attainable. What do you think. I'm gonna guess that Amazon has a Polish version of their website where you can order stuff for delivery and Poland. And someone went out and bought Fang. Now, Fang is tnically it is and it is not a hamateur radio equipment.
It's no secret that Valfang targets the ham radio community with their Ubi five, RUV eighty two, several other models of Balfang radios. They also have some GMRS only radios. They also have some commercial only radios. They have a large line of radios for many different services, but the amateur radio community is largely targeted when it comes to Balfang. Now, I don't know that these guys had Balfang's I don't know. It doesn't say it just says they
were easily obtained and they cost about thirty bucks apot. What do you think it might be? I mean, there's other radios out there that are cheap and you can get and you can key up and type DTMF tones into the pad. So the lesson here is to change frequencies and don't publish your frequencies, or to change your tones and don't publish that, or to just get like some sort of encryption system, which, let's face is expensive. It's
expensive. I don't know. These two guys were arrested for this radio hack presumably I mean poland they don't mess around over there. You could probably do something like that here. Most of our systems in this country, in the USA are either encrypted or some sort of authentication system exists. Some sort of handshake has to take place before you can just keep up with some random radio on either an analog or a digital network. So something like that here is
more unlikely but not impossible. It's not impossible you could do something like this, but to have it just wide open. I think it's really great of the Polish police to have arrested someone so quickly after the fact, because it might others think that they don't want any part of it if they were wanting to try something, and it does seem to be politically motivated. With the tension between the Ukraine and Russia right now, with the war going on between
Ukraine and Russia right now, it does seem to be politically motivated. The fact that they were broadcasting the Russian national anthem makes me think that, yeah, I'm even more in favor of these guys getting arrested. But they didn't mess around. You know, everybody's always saying that the FCC doesn't do anything. You're not gonna get arrested, they're not going to come to your house, you're not gonna get fine, et cetera, et cetera. Apparently in
Poland that is not the case. I read this article and I'm like, I like the fact that it didn't name the radio because I'm like, I bet I know what that is. I bet I know what that is. So what do you think? Have you heard of this story? Have you heard of similar stories where a specific thirty dollars radio has been used to interfere with a public transit system or some sort of system that runs on radio,
But it's not actually a radio repeater or something like a train. A train's not a radio repeater, A train's not a radio system, but it's controlled by radio. So they used a radio to disrupt this train. Put a comment blow tell me what you think.