China mulls space-based control system for high-speed rail. Can it be hacked?

On a summer evening in 2011, two high-speed trains hurtling through the Chinese countryside met in a fireball of twisted metal and shattered glass. The Wenzhou disaster, as it came to be known, killed 40 people and injured nearly 200. The official inquiry traced the catastrophe to a lightning strike that had fried a trackside circuit, making one train “invisible” to the control centre, which then wrongly cleared the line for the train behind. However, could the “brain” of the railway ever be...

By Stephen Chen