A 23-year-old university student spoofed signals and triggered an emergency alarm that stopped four Taiwan High-Speed Rail trains for nearly an hour, disrupting services during the Qingming Festival holiday. Authorities say the attacker used a software-defined radio to analyse THSRC signals, decoded the parameters and then programmed handheld radios to imitate legitimate THSR beacons, triggering a general emergency alarm that forced trains into manual emergency stop mode.
The incident, which THSR recorded as 48 minutes of disruption, exposed a long‑standing vulnerability: the same system parameters had been used for 19 years and were not rotated.
Police recovered 11 handheld radios, an SDR receiver and a laptop at the student’s residence, and prosecutors say the student may face up to 10 years in prison for offences including interference with public transportation and exploiting vulnerabilities in a protected computer system; the police arrested him on 28 April and later released him on NT$100,000 bail.
The case has prompted debate about the security of a rail system carrying more than 80 million passengers a year and the need to update and test critical infrastructure against cheap radio tools and open‑source software. According to the Taipei Times, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications pledged to report on hardening the railway’s communication security after the incident.