At least in the U.S., during the 1970s and 1980s (and likely before), many tollways and other ticket-based systems used to use publicly distributed and collected "IBM-style" punched cards along with automated equipment. When someone entered a toll way, for example, one would receive a punched card which would be handed to an attendant at the exit. Presumably, the cards could be fed into a computer to, among other things, produce a report of how much different portions of the tollway were used. If toll collectors kept stacks of cards in order, and placed a "time of day" card onto the stack every hour, such reports could also include information about rush-hour and non-rush-hour usage compared.
Did such systems make any effort to guard against the possibility that a malicious person with a card punch might alter cards so as to not only supply meaningless information, but perhaps disrupt system operations in more serious ways, such as by having a few consecutive motorists at a toll booth submit a JCL control card followed by some cards that were programmed to run malicious code? Were there ever any incidents of them being attacked in such a fashion? Or were the set of people with the knowledge that would be needed to perform such an attack and the set of people who would want to carry out such an attack sufficiently disjoint that no such attacks were ever attempted?
