Great article! Kudos to the white hat hackers who pulled off the repair, and the company that hired them. We should be able to fix our own stuff, always!
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Oh, Lower Silesia. Some of my relatives were from that area. Wouldn't be surprised if one of the hackers was my Nth removed cousin.
NEWAG said “Our software is clean. We have not introduced, we do not introduce and we will not introduce into the software of our trains any solutions that lead to intentional failures.
Watch the weasel word there. If its software leads to failures to its trains, NEWAG can always claim that it was not intentional, and that it was not lying. Including this "workshop detection". Or the bloody telemetry unit; together they did introduce a failure to the trains, regardless of "muh intenshun".
“Hacking IT systems is a violation of many legal provisions and a threat to railway traffic safety,” NEWAG added. “We do not know who interfered with the train control software, using what methods and what qualifications. We also notified the Office of Rail Transport about this so that it could decide to withdraw from service the sets subjected to the activities of unknown hackers.”
"Fear, uncertainty, doubt" comes to my mind.
In addition to right to repair laws, I feel like governments are utterly unprepared when it comes to businesses trying to bully the government's population into submission. This should be addressed, and the legal apparatus being misused by those businesses should be checked and fixed.