Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

TL;DR:

* Polish train maintenance company, SPS, was getting suspicious as trains made by a company, Newag, kept on "randomly" breaking and couldn't be fixed. They was getting fined millions by Polish government as they had a contract that fined them for being too slow with repairs.

* They secretly hired literal hackers (Dragon Sector) for 2 months to dig around Newag train code.

* Hackers found out some incredible things, generally that fit under the umbrella of "late-stage capitalism", or more specifically, corporate protectionism, sabotage, ransom, etc.

Some examples of the secret code that the hackers found:

* Breaks the trains if they go into geo polygons that are right around the warehouses of 5 Polish train maintenance companies, including SPS.

* Breaks the trains after 1 million kilometers.

* Breaks the trains if they don't move for 10 days.

* Secret button press combination (basically Tekken, Street Fighter, etc.) to disable the "malfunctions".



Do you know if the low-level technical report is available? I love reverse engineering firmware, and this sounds like a holy grail. I mean a freaking train? Ugh someone should drop binaries.


Some info is here https://badcyber.com/dieselgate-but-for-trains-some-heavywei... , but the actual details will be presented at the Chaos Communication Congress at the end of December.


Not found one yet. The linked article contains a very small amount of detail, such as the lat-long coordinate values they found within the dissassembled code, etc., but not much else unfortunately.

I'm waiting for the stuxnet-like report on this as much as anyone.


What noobs. Everyone knows you've got to put that chicanery behind a web service call so they can't find the evidence directly from the client.


Let's not give anybody ideas now shall we.

https://api.newag.pl/shouldirunornot?lat=&long=&trainid=

can't wait to see the swagger docs on this...


Just realized: “late stage enshittification of capitalism” is essentially “verelendung” as prophesized by Marx


"Immiseration" as known in English.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: