The next big jailbreak in tech: John Deere tractors

It featured a hack called Sick Codes. A way to tie down John Deere tractors, which could give farmers the opportunity to repair their equipment themselves.

When you think of technological innovations, your mind may not immediately jump to the agricultural sector. As farming and agriculture continue to be automated, John Deere has found a digital backdoor. To confirm this, be sure to inspect the damaged parts of the tractor Farmers are forced To turn to the company’s own repair service. But According to the ropeabove At Defcon in Las Vegas over the weekend, a hacker named SickCodes offered a jailbreak that puts patches into their hands by giving them access to Traktor’s consumer interface.

“Farmers choose older equipment just because they want reliability. They don’t want things to go wrong during the most important part of the year when they have to get things out of the ground,” Sick Codes told Wired. It means being able to repair or make decisions about existing software.

Patient Code told Wired that it spent several months experimenting with touch-screen consoles on various John Deere tractor models to develop the jailbreak. The hack involved finding a way to bypass the tractor’s dealer’s authentication requirements, which included a pain code that meant the tractor was being delivered to a John Deere dealer. Here, he confirmed that the infected code had access to more than 1.5 gigabytes of logs; Used by dealers to assess problems with the tractor – which the average person can’t even see.

The hack brings more attention to the actual repair activity, which is based on the owner’s idea. If commercial electronics can’t repair something themselves, they need to find cheaper repair options. New York State has approved the right to repair In June It requires digital electronics manufacturers in the state to provide customers with instructions for repairing their devices and products.