In one of the coolest and more outrageous repair stories in quite some time, three white-hat hackers helped a regional rail company in southwest Poland unbrick a train that had been artificially rendered inoperable by the train’s manufacturer after an independent maintenance company worked on it. The train’s manufacturer is now threatening to sue the hackers who were hired by the independent repair company to fix it.
After breaking trains simply because an independent repair shop had worked on them, NEWAG is now demanding that trains fixed by hackers be removed from service.
Good opportunity for the new polish government to show that they’re actually sane.
I wonder if they’ll be able to overclock those trains or install some mods.
“The president of Newag contacted me,” Cieszyński wrote. "He claims that Newag fell victim to cybercriminals and it was not an intentional action by the company
Yes, those cybercriminals that once infiltrated in a business network, instead of stealing data or holding ransoms, hide multiple iterations in the code of a snippet that only benefits the corp. Sure, they exist
Holy shit. If I understand correctly, the trains were programmed to use their GPS sensors to detect if they were ever physically moved to an independent repair shop. If they detected that they were at an independent repair shop, they were programmed to lock themselves and give strange and nonsensical error codes. Typing in an unlock code at the engineer’s console would allow the trains to start working normally again.
If there were a corporation-sized mirror, I don’t know how NEWAG could look at itself in it.
The government better sue the train manufacturer and protect these hackers. The hackers saved the state millions - possibly hundreds of millions.
The European Union is an antidemocratic corporate cartel.
Good thing it wasn’t the EU that made the trains 👌
Maybe you should stop huffing Orban’s farts.
No, I huff Marxist economist and ex-Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis’ farts.
It would be interesting to see if Alstom, Hyundai Rotem, and Stadler Rail are doing the same. They are sitting on billions in public sector contracts.
Stadler (sic)
?
