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.
Thank you! Came here to ask if anyone had one source with the whole story. This keeps trickling out as it evolves.
Edit: this story is considerably weirder than I expected, and I was already expecting some weird shit.
Begs the question: How is any of this legal?
I would assume it is not, UE has some strict rules about fair competition, but the problem is to prove that in the court. Newag is arguing that the hacked and reverse engineered code is not the code they have. Probably in the meantime they run the cleaning protocol in the company…
But company’s public image will hopefully suffer from the story, maybe at least they loose in eyes of potential buyers.