#BRICK RIGS ARMED FORCES SOFTWARE#

Among Sickcodes' many findings were that the control system was sending huge amounts of data back to John Deere (once he had admin access, the unit tried to send 1.5GB of data), various security backdoors including one enabled through placing an empty text file on the drive, and John Deere's apparent reliance on open source software that may not be being used appropriately under its licensing terms. So: this hack runs Doom, and also has potentially enormous consequences for agribusiness: or, at the very least, for farmers who've had enough of John Deere's practices.

The European Union announced earlier this year it was establishing a right to repair principle, while some US states have already passed their own right-to-repair laws: the pressure resulted in the company announcing this March that it would widen access to repair tools. Regardless of hacks, however, John Deere is also facing serious government and regulatory pressure. The jailbreak developed by Sickcodes is not remote, but requires physical access to the equipment. 'This foundational work will pave the path for farmers to retake control of the equipment that they own.'

'John Deere has repeatedly told regulators that farmers can't be trusted to repair their own equipment,' writes Wiens. As the Ukrainian incident showed, and as Doctorow pointed out at the time, 'this meant that anyone who could hack John Deere's system could brick any tractor-including, say, the Russian military's hacking squads.'Īnother attendee at the talk was right-to-repair advocate Kyle Wiens, who pointed out that John Deere's control unit is built on outdated and unpatched systems: 'While it's true that the John Deere tractor monopoly means that defects in the company's products could affect farms all around the world, it's also true that John Deere is very, very bad at information security:'Įssentially John Deere has the entire agricultural industry by the short-and-curlies, justifies this with dubious claims about why the status quo it has constructed is essential, and has power over farmers that it has no right to hold. One attendee of the talk was prominent tech thinker Cory Doctorow, who subsequently wrote (opens in new tab):

The scarier prospect is that so much of the farming industry depends on John Deere keeping its systems secure from bad actors.īlasting through fields aside, the implications of this hack could be seriously big within the agriculture industry. John Deere itself might not have any plans to do such a thing, but then again it did recently show it could 'brick' Ukrainian farming equipment stolen by the Russians. There's the simple fact that a huge amount of the world's food supply depends on John Deere equipment, and so any large-scale software problems could be catastrophic. This is on one level a nasty monopoly practice, but the implications of it are much wider. These tractors are designed so that farmers can't fix problems themselves. The biggest firm in the agricultural manufacturing field is John Deere, which makes all kinds of machinery that runs on the company's proprietary software: which both monitors farmers extremely closely and force them to involve John Deere whenever there's a problem. While the mainstream reacted with disgust to the BMW stuff, anyone who's ever been near a farm probably wasn't so surprised: farming equipment has been screwing them like this for decades.

Brick rigs armed forces