MBTA Fare Kiosks Are Hackable: Report

BOSTON, MA — The kiosks the MBTA uses to collect fares run on Windows XP, an operating system Microsoft ended support for in 2014. That led some cybersecurity experts to tell the Boston Herald that the system is vulnerable to attacks by hackers. In May, the MBTA said it would indefinitely delay rolling out a new fare collection system that was to have been fully implemented by 2021.

“If an attacker was able to get administrative privileges, they would have full access to that machine,” Alina Oprea, a computer science professor at Northeastern University, told the newspaper. An MBTA spokesman said the transit system has kept security patches up to date and the chances of an attack are minimized because the system is used on a closed network.