foreign hackers

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Farmers Turn to Tractor Hacking to Fight Corporate Gouging

Sam Rolley | Personal Liberty | March 22, 2017

Reports that American farmers are turning to foreign hackers just so they are able to work on equipment sold to them by John Deere shine light on a new problem in the era of software-controlled durable goods. In a bygone era, it wouldn’t be uncommon to find a grease-covered farmer working his tractor over to avoid costly downtime on the farm, sometimes even employing jerry-rig solutions meant to hold just long enough to get through the growing season. But as tractors, like everything else, become more technologically advanced, companies like John Deere are installing locks that make it impossible for certain maintenance to be performed without the  help of a costly technician...

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Investigation: US Power Grid Vulnerable to Foreign Hacks

Garance Burke and Jonathan Fahey | Phys.org | December 21, 2015

Security researcher Brian Wallace was on the trail of hackers who had snatched a California university's housing files when he stumbled into a larger nightmare: Cyberattackers had opened a pathway into the networks running the United States power grid. Digital clues pointed to Iranian hackers. And Wallace found that they had already taken passwords, as well as engineering drawings of dozens of power plants, at least one with the title "Mission Critical." The drawings were so detailed that experts say skilled attackers could have used them, along with other tools and malicious code, to knock out electricity flowing to millions of homes...

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