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.
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‽
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.
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.
“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.”
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
The person is doing a talk about it in hamburg, germany (37c3) next week. Its on my to watch list because that sounds hella interresting.
Edit : 37c3 list of talks : https://halfnarp.events.ccc.de/#dec115da17562cebafa9ba7a150a4fc607c25c880c03593dcc8da6087c9441a4
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.
This is the kind of government intervention I can get behind. This story is so outrageous, it’s hard to believe it’s true.
Artificially bricked?! Who the hell keeps giving Viagra to trains? Evil bastards.
