Cruising around on an electric skateboard might sound like fun, but it’s all fun and games until a hacker decides he/she wants to throw you off your joyride and wipe the joy away. New reports are showing that electric skateboards can be targeted by hackers and this could potentially lead to death if they seize control of the boards under the wrong circumstances.

“Richo Healey was riding his electric skateboard toward an intersection in Melbourne, Australia, last year when suddenly the board cold-stopped beneath him and tossed him to the street,” reported Wired.

“He couldn’t control the board and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. There was no obvious mechanical defect, so being a computer security engineer, his mind naturally flew to other scenarios: could he have been hacked?”

While he later realized that a flurry of Bluetooth frequencies from an intersection was the reason his board stopped so abruptly, he couldn’t help thinking about whether or not these boards could be hacked. What was curiosity turned into FacePlant and exploit that Healey and a fellow researcher Mike Ryan at Stripe, developed that would be able to relinquish control to anyone using it.

“[The attack] is basically a synthetic version of the same RF noise [at that intersection in Melbourne],” he says, and allows them to cold stop a board or send it flying in reverse, tossing the rider in either case, according to the Wired report.

“It’s easy to point to this and say, oh it’s just a skateboard,” Healey says. “But for people who are buying these boards and commuting on them every day … there is risk obviously associated with that…. We explicitly did this research in order to make the devices safer.”

The researchers are planning to display their findings at DefCon, one of the premier security conferences being held in Las Vegas this week.

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