I hope this NEWAG gets raked over the coals for this.

It's outrageous to hold public infrastructure at ransom because the equipment spent X days in an independent repair shop - and pretty invasive to have DRM monitoring the train's GPS location, and in some cases live reporting these back to the manufacturer to facilitate a remote lockdown.

Not to mention pushing an update to flag up a copyright warning on a screen in the drivers' cab while the train is running 🤦‍♂️

I commend the engineer at the independent repair facility that had the idea to have hackers pick apart the train's control unit, and the rest of the team for agreeing to it.

The GPS coordinates are especially damning. Also funny that the manufacturer is claiming they made the trains unsafe, since obviously once they uncovered the unlock code they can just use it on unmodified trains.

Modifying the software of a device YOU OWN, should never be illegal in and of itself.

~~The mere fact that the manufacturer had a remote kill switch is the safety issue that should have a big spotlight.~~(edit: this is not the case - see the reply below) What if a malicious hacker decides to trigger that kill switch while the train is loaded with people and at a sensitive moment (e.g. on bridge/cliff with a huge drop).

If the kill switch were in place for dealing with hi-jackers, perhaps fair enough. But having it for the purpose of business protectionism is an entirely reckless safety risk.

There’s an overlooked failure here: why doesn’t the Polish transport authority have a clause in their procurement contracts that bans trains with remote-control kill switches that are not under user control? And why wasn’t the code reviewed to catch that in advance? The hackers say they did not alter the code, which somewhat implies that the source code might have been available for inspection.

Man, just go back to normal trains and now computers with attached trains. Can't hack or remotely kill what doesn't have a computer in it.