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Last year, the Polish hacking group Dragon Sector was contacted by a public sector train company whose Newag trains kept going out of service. The operator suspected that Newag had boobytrapped the trains to punish the train company for getting its maintenance from a third-party contractor. When Dragon Sector investigated, they discovered that Newag had indeed *riddled* the trains' firmware with boobytraps.
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Cory Doctorow
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Trains that were taken to locations known to have third-party maintenance workshops were immediately bricked (hilariously, this bomb would detonate if trains just passed through stations *near* to these workshops, which is why another train company had to remove all the GPSes from its trains - they kept slamming to a halt when they approached a station near a third-party workshop).
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Long thread/40
But Newag's logic bombs would brick trains for *all kinds* of reasons - just keeping a train stationary for a few days would brick it. Installing third-party components in a locomotive would also trigger a bomb, bricking the train.
In their talk at last year's Chaos Communications Congress, the Dragon Sector folks describe how they have been legally terrorized by Newag, which has repeatedly sued them for violating its "IP" by revealing its sleazy, corrupt business practices.
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by Cory Doctorow ;
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