Never tried this myself.
Interesting times.
Have witnessed this also for our Prime Minister driving past with a convoy of police and black SUV's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_signal_preemption
I vaguely have memories of the state legislator having to pass new laws after the devices were installed because it was not technically illegal to have the emitter in your vehicle.
> Because the sensors’ firmware is also not digitally signed and access to them is not restricted to authorized parties, an attacker can alter the firmware or modify the configuration of the sensors.
Who deploys systems out into the wild these days without even giving a moment of consideration to security? This seems like "amateur hour" systems design. Did not a single engineer step up and say "Hey, uh, guys, do we want to at least take basic steps to obfuscate this stuff?"
Sounds like negligence. Not surprising their vice president of engineering has "nothing more to add to the matter."
The attitude of "eh, no one is really hacking it" is a common one, and might possibly be the right decision from a business standpoint. And if they get shamed into changing it, they'll issue some sort of patch, or announce the Windows utility is no longer available without credentials, and everyone will rest assured things are OK.
This is really quite common.
Of course they did. But they eventually learned to be "team players", or they moved on to another project.
This is changing (I'm seeing specifications for new systems that at least have placeholders for "Security"), but it will be slow and painful. Remember that at the low end, there are still engineers who can't understand why everyone isn't writing their programs in Assembly.
Just think of all the gas savings.
What's scary about that scene is that so much of our infrastructure is available on the Internet. There are projects scanning for "support systems" (including the baby monitor in yesterday's story), but most of these system rely on technology that's older and less well maintained than our computer systems.
[1] The Italian Job (2003) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317740/
[2] The Italian Job (1969) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064505/
