Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them

Hackers unbricked a train in Poland that had been deliberately disabled by its manufacturer. Now the manufacturer is threatening legal action against the hackers despite evidence it sabotaged the trains. From a report: The manufacturer is also now demanding that the repaired trains immediately be removed from service because they have been "hacked," and thus might now be unsafe, a claim they also cannot substantiate. The situation is a heavy machinery example of something that happens across most categories of electronics, from phones, laptops, health devices, and wearables to tractors and, apparently, trains. In this case, NEWAG, the manufacturer of the Impuls family of trains, put code in the train's control systems that prevented them from running if a GPS tracker detected that it spent a certain number of days in an independent repair company's maintenance center, and also prevented it from running if certain components had been replaced without a manufacturer-approved serial number. This anti-repair mechanism is called "parts pairing," and is a common frustration for farmers who want to repair their John Deere tractors without authorization from the company. It's also used by Apple to prevent independent repair of iPhones.

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