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.
I thought white hat hackers only do their shitty CTF exercise everyday. Wouldn’t hacking a DRM’ed national train be a black hat interaction? I’d like to know if that company can press charges.
If you RTFA, they were paid by the repair company who was paid by the private train operator to fix the train. In doing so, they reverse engineered the hardware/firmware and found the DRM added by the manufacturer to prevent the repair company from doing the repairs by bricking the train.
Depends on your definition of “ethical”
If the train owner allowed it, it’s just maintenance that happens to affect software.
Hacking would be if it was not authorized by the owner.
Any maintenance not authorized by the train maker entitles them at most to suspend the Warranty.
Yes yes, how dare they unbrick public transportation infrastructure.
Fuck off.
Most ethical vehicle manufacturer:
(This is a joke)
I like how, instead of recognizing that they got caught, now the train manufacturer is claiming this is some kind of dark PR strategy.
If it is, then please show the public that it’s a dark PR strategy by explaining the hidden unlock codes and the DRM code!
This story should be on every newspaper front page right below war correspondents.
Yeah, especially in the EU where apparently their laws regarding circumventing DRM might make the people who fixed this the bad guys instead of this comically evil manufacturer who put GPS kill switches on public passenger trains.
right below war correspondents
Eh, they should report war on the same page as the weather if you ask me.
in the sport section
Go Team Go.
Put the election polling there too.
Let us know what country you’re in, so the next time you’re invaded and genocided we’ll remember it’s barely as important as the weather forecast.
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That’s generous but their user history makes it pretty obvious that they’re mad about aid being sent at all when it could go to paying off their student loan debt instead.
as if those are mutually exclusive things to have lol
Why not both?
Ask them, I think it’s stupid as shit to frame them as mutually exclusive choices.
My reading of that was “climate change will kill most of our species in the long term if we don’t take it seriously, so that’s also something very important to track and belongs on the same page as wars.”.
Well, climate change is front page news…
the world’s not one’s to fix, learn to protect yourself.
No the current model everywhere is to pay a vendor. I’m sure someone can get KPMG or Deloitte to fix the world.
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That’s awesome. Man, fuck that company. Bricking a train? Outrageous.
Poland ought to ban that company from ever working or operating or selling any products inside of its country and any trains made by that company that are not currently owned by Poland should be prevented from traveling on the tracks that cross through Poland.
Maybe make it the entire executive and senior management, rather than the company.
unfortunately they have a right wing government so it’s likely they’ll want more of this not less
They just swore in the new Cabinet today. They still have a far right President and Judiciary to contend with but the legislature is a coalition of centrists and leftists now.
I was wondering why Orban “left the room” when the EU Council voted for initiating membership negotiations with Ukraine (thus abstaining) rather than vote against it (and thus veto it) and thought that maybe he didn’t have Poland covering his back anymore (in the sense of stopping later reprisals if he blocked it), at least when it came to his pro-Russia posture.
Now given that change in Poland, I’m thinking it’s a much more far reaching thing and Hungary is now much closer to have their rights suspended as an EU Member.
Yes, however there is still a natural resistance to kicking anyone out of a political entity. Just because nobody wants to start those conversations for fear of their name getting floated.
This is the kind of government intervention I can get behind. This story is so outrageous, it’s hard to believe it’s true.
Realistically, that would be quite an overreaction and the corporation does have valuable knowledge and skill in creating trains. But how great it would be if this were to cause open source code to be a requirement…
I feel like train operators will have heard of this, and will not be accepting that company’s tenders
Run by fucking criminals. We should brick them like they’re The Sticky Bandits
Great idea, Marv.
Better to brick them like The Cask of Amontillado.
SPS became desperate and Googled “Polish hackers” and came across a group called Dragon Sector, a reverse-engineering team made up of white hat hackers.
Hilarious. I hope 404 continues with this level of high quality journalism.
Dragon sector, who they hired, is a security capture the flag team.
Edit: Socials of those who worked on it
https://social.hackerspace.pl/@q3k
https://infosec.exchange/@mrtick
https://infosec.exchange/@redfordTIL that [security CTF](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag_(cybersecurity\)) is
an exercise in which participants attempt to find text strings, called “flags”, which are secretly hidden in purposefully-vulnerable programs or websites
Never heard of this and I may not be alone in that. Thanks for pointing this out.
I did one before. They are SO MUCH FUN. Now I have too many children.
sob
edit: There are other ways of capturing the flag like having your team name on the home page of a local web server or whatever.
You make it sound like the event ends in an orgy.
The good ones do
Finally, hackers with a cool name, like Bellingcat or Oryx. It’s all I’m asking for, but the Russian and North Korean hackers are so disappointing in so many ways.
When the government bankrolls you, you’re not allowed to have fun.
“We didn’t add a kill switch to our trains to force the use of our maintenance service, but fuck the hackers that removed the kill switch we didn’t implement, and the trains that were hacked and don’t have the kill switch we didn’t add should be removed from service.”
“And how dare those hackers go through all the trouble of finding those (literal) GPS coordinates of train maintenance centers not in our system to circumvent us getting more money.”
Dear Reader,
Regarding your recent free and non-profitable un-fucking of our problem, please use the honor system and manually refuck yourself.
Love, Technology Companies.
Someone’s gonna figure out a horror movie for this called The Refucker
Wasn’t free - they were paid to hack it.
But yeah.
Could be free as in freedom, as opposed to free as in beer?
But freedom isn’t free. Costs a buckofive.
You fucking numpty.
I wonder if they were taking notes from John Deere and the automotive industry or will it be the reverse here soon?
Just imagine all these vehicles that could be bricked for not going back to the stealerships for outrageous prices on parts and incompetent service.
Also the vehicles that could be disabled for not paying for device protection plan that allows your vehicle to operate safely. It would be a shame if your vehicle stopped working on your way to work or the hospital.
I suspect Tesla, BMW, and John Deere are the closest to this reality.
I sure hope the government doesn’t help with another great cash for clunkers national program to get rid of more cars too old for these measures. Sure is a great way to drive new car sales though…
If the manufacturer can stop your trains, then obviously anyone with the necessary hacking skills can do it too. Certain governments might be very interested in tampering with the logistics of another country.
Oh don’t count GM and a Ford out of it. They’re already kicking android auto and Apple car to the curb so they can control more stuff and get access to more data. The savvier they get the closer that comes to reality.
Of course, by the end of our lives you won’t own a car at all. You’ll subscribe to a car company that will act like a hybrid ride share and rental program. Commutes will be on a rideshare basis and you’ll be able to rent a car for a weekend road trip.
I just heard about GM this morning in my tech news. I didn’t realize that about Ford too.
I’ve drawn a line in the sand with my vehicles at about 2011 for tech. I love tech and I love cars but just not into the current versions of everything being touch screen controls.
Give me knobs for climate controls, gear shifters, and gauges for the rest. They don’t need all of these computer systems that fail or become outdated as soon as they are released like the manufacturer’s nav systems. We also don’t need them to stop working completely because a sensor failed and can only be replaced by the dealer.
My phone in a holder can be the smartest part of the car for me thanks.
Stop reading my mind.
You can pry my older cars from my cold, dead, hand.
I think you can go further. My 2017 A4 is still “normal.”
I’m glad to hear that. Often I’ve driven rental cars and *last time I struggled to find the gear shifter which was replaced by buttons on the dash.
I’ve also seen just a video of a Tesla only new driver struggle to drive a ICE car because it had a gear shifter and didn’t automatically brake. I’m feeling like a dinosaur now…
John Deere was hardly the first. We introduced legislation to regulate the automotive industry in 1994.
Apparently there was some kind of gps geo fencing going on - that the software detected the train went into an uncertified repair yard and bricked the thing. So I assume the hackers just purged that info, or unset the flags that denoted the brick condition so as far as the train software was concerned it was operating normally.
It’s an interesting hack but there is a safety aspect to this too. A train is a complex machine that could go catastrophically wrong and kill a bunch of people. It’s not quite Boeing 737 levels of safety criticality but neither is it something that should be taken lightly with regards to service procedure or parts procurement. So the manufacturer were being dicks to brick the train. But the train operator using an unauthorised repairer who might not have access to, let alone follow the correct servicing procedures or parts is not good either.
Steam engine breaks, you can fix it.
Steam engine with digital circuit breaks, you’re a hacker, a pirate. DRM was a mistake.
But how else could companies make more money off of something you already paid for? Will someone think of the shareholders‽
If you’re allowed to do any maintenance you want on the physical components of something you own, then you should be allowed to do any maintenance you want on the software components of something you own.
It’s not hacking (in the sense of “unauthorized intrusion”) if you own it or have authorization to do it from the owner of it.
I hate this fucking planet.
I think this is pretty cool. Sure, capitalists are gonna capitalist, but here we have subversive moves in a positive direction.
Oh yeah what the people did to get around this is fucking awesome I do love that side of this story don’t get me wrong.
If they required the trains to be serviced by manufacturer they should have written it into a mandatory service contract at time of sales.
If anybody wants to know more, they can watch it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8NqBXT6Kos
Ah, Louis Rossmann, a real-life superhero. He did some great work in his career.
Why are you referring to him in the past tense? AFAIK he and his cat are still ranting about tech rights on the daily.
Don’t forget his friend Foxy
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=w8NqBXT6Kos
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Artificially bricked?! Who the hell keeps giving Viagra to trains? Evil bastards.
Sir Toppam Hat
Where did the independent repair shop and cracker smackers touch you on the doll NEWAG 14WE EMU
