This is serious, and while it was a hoax, it could have had much more devastating results acting as a propagation vector for malware, a phishing attack as the social engineering potential here for anything offline or online is huge :"About 10,000 commuters who subscribe to the train operator's timetable messaging service received the threatening text message on Friday night after hackers broke into the system. The message, sent after 9.30pm (AEDT), reads: ALLAHU AKBR FROM CONNEX! our inspectorS Love Killing people - if you see one coming, run. Want to bomb a train? they will gladly help. See you in hell!"
ALLAHU AKBR means "God is the Greatest". Now which God is the greatest I'll leave up to your religious beliefs, though the Muslim motives are spooky and the attack directly undermines the citizens' confidence in their government's ability to protect them -- what I anticipate next are articles on how terrorists take control over the trains. I'm very interested in who's having acccess to the company's feature, and most importantly to what extend are they outsourcing, or was it an insider that used someone else's terminal to send the message? Here's a related post on the interest of various governments into developing an SMS disaster alert and warning systems and the related security/impersonation problems to consider.
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