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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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IoT Botnets Are Growing—and Up for Hire

Jamie Condliffe | MIT Technology Review | November 30, 2016

The army of Internet-connected devices being corralled and controlled to take down online services is active, growing—and up for grabs. Internet of things botnets—collections of devices hacked to work with one another to send debilitating surges of data to servers—have been blamed for several recent Internet failures. Most notably, the servers of domain name system host Dyn were taken down last month, affecting connectivity across large swaths of the East Coast of the U.S...

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Researchers Hid Malware Inside an AI's 'Neurons' and It Worked Scarily Well

Radhamely De Leon | Motherboard | July 22, 2021

Neural networks could be the next frontier for malware campaigns as they become more widely used, according to a new study. The study, which was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Monday, found that malware can be embedded directly into the artificial neurons that make up machine-learning models in a way that keeps them from being detected. The neural network would even be able to continue performing its set tasks normally.

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