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.
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.
They weren’t doing anything smartphone manufacturers haven’t been doing for years. Or those guys that make McDonalds ice cream machines.
With the difference that a government agency is operating these trains and that repairs are not cheap.
Governments (and the public sector in general) are treated way worse by companies than private customers who can far more easily switch to a competitor or influence others to do so
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