Train Safety to Begin

[dehusman]

The article says nothing about giving "elected officials" access to access to hazmat information.  It talks about "state officals", probably the state police or the state homeland security people mentioned earlier in the article, people who would know what they are looking at and would be able to use the information.  This is basically the same information the railroad would provide its customers to track their shipments, through portals that have been in place for years.  They access relatively basic information, and don't allow access to any areas
that control anything.  The dispatching systems are separate systems that aren't directly connected to anything the public can get to and the signal systems are another layer of systems that operate independently of the dispatching systems as far as fail safe protection goes.

The master criminal hacking into all operating systems at once is pretty much Hollywood stuff.

Dave H.

[tree68]

I would imagine that access will be fairly tightly controlled, and probably mostly real-time.  The average legislator or city councilman has little or no need to access the information, much less carry it around on a laptop.

A couple of days with some binoculars in that apartment house down by the tracks will provide me with enough information to do a nefarious deed - I don't need to hack a scheduling or routing website or other such data.

Given reasonable safeguards, the data will be no less secure than it is now.

[squeeze]

According to an article in today's paper, Tuesday begins a new ruling that is to be enforced. Being that there are at least two times in a year that actually starts a new year (January starts a calendar new year, and July starts a new fiscal year), I was wondering what this new ruling deals with? According to the next to last paragraph, New Jersey can now tap into the CSX computer system. With the recent compromises of our elected officials' computers, wouldn't that invite disaster to our rail system? I'm not quite sure what kind of protection our elected officials carry on their computers, but this has to raise the hair on the back of ones neck to think what might be available to anyone who can "hack" into data systems. I find it hard to believe that elected officials computers were un-protected, such as password protected, firewall enabled, and critical info encrypted just to name a few. This would leave the data of all infrastructure systems as fair game to anyone with modest training, open to invasion. The article appears at the following website:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribunereview/news/breaking/s_575224.html

Hope this link activates.

Thanks,
Jim