Public transport chip card for students has been cracked

The public transport chip card for students has also been cracked. Two students have succeeded in converting a weekly subscription on a student public transport chip card into a weekend card in just two seconds, a university magazine reports.

The University newspaper Groningen will publish the hack on Thursday. Two unnamed students would have succeeded in converting a weekly subscription into a weekend subscription and vice versa. That would only take two seconds, reports the university newspaper on its website.

The students allegedly spent a month cracking the card, but claim they could have hacked the card in a week if they had worked on it full-time. The public transport chip card has been cracked for some time, but recently the card has been in the news again, because there are now simpler and cheaper hacks.

The practicality of the student card hack is limited. The student card is registered by name, which means that detected fraud can be quickly linked to a person. It has been possible for some time to increase the balance on the card and to check in the card ‘artificially’.