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Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

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Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#21

Post by ABeeSea »

hinkley wrote: post #14
ABeeSea wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blacksmith was a job. Forge was the location. And industrial forges are very, very large. Blacksmith:Farmer::Forge:Farm

Foundries were a thing, but even those are giving way to factories, right? I mean, someone will always make stock, but fewer companies melt metal these days, or at the very least relative to those that carve it up or weld it together (which may or may not involve a little melting, given spin welding and other techniques).

Foundries and forges are different things.

A forge is closer to what you would call a manufacturing factory:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging

A foundry smelts. But it is also technically a factory for input material. In the same way a sawmill is a factory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundry

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#23

Post by louis___ »

HEHENE wrote: post #2

Having worked on a John Deere integration for an agtech company I can't say I'm surprised. The MyJohnDeere API had a lot of idiosyncrasies that smelled like inexperienced or mismanaged development, especially around authentication/authorization. At the time I was working on it they had some extremely arcane authentication process that required round-trip emails, various link clicking and code entering, and all kinds…

> Really cool stuff happening in agtech.

I don't know if I agree with you. These kind of agtech farms tend to get heavy on pesticides use and tillage, which on the long term kills the ground life.

And it leaves the farmers' hands tied when a bug happens : https://www.vice.com/en/article/xykkkd/why-american-farmers-...

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#24

Post by GuB-42 »

universa1 wrote: post #19
nightowl_games wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a new word for these high tech massive farming operations. I come from the Canadian farming sector. Most of the farmers here are individuals, or medium sized family operations. Even the big farms aren't "high tech". There just a lot of guys and a bunch of leased machines. We have essentially 0 "high tech" farms. I wouldn't say "modern farms are very high tech operations", I'd say "high tech industrial players…

hmm... having grown up on a farm in Germany and even though my father was only employed as the manager, it still felt more like "our" farm. It was definately a big farm compared to the german average, but then that average also includes a lot of part-time/side-business farms, where. Despite the size, the general methods between a smaller and a larger farm are not that different imho. But the amount of tech in a moder…

> Also it is a somewhat bogus comparison: Mostly nobody complains that their car / laptop / smartphone comes from a factory, but for farming there is this strange preference for something of 50-100years past.

It is not specific to farming. Handmade, artisan stuff sells well, even when it is objectively worse. And in general, people are more sympathetic to small businesses than big, faceless corporations. We value the human element I guess.

As for food, we tend to equate big farms with everything bad with current agriculture, even if it doesn't have to do with it: crops bred for yield instead of taste/nutrition, monoculture with pesticides/herbicides, ... It is partly true because small, traditional farms then to focus on quality and ethics/sustainability/... rather than price, because they can't compete on price.

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#25

Post by DetroitThrow »

universa1 wrote: post #20
cosmodisk wrote: post #18

The problem with a lot of these old school companies is that any development work would always be treated as 2nd tier. Very very few,if any, CEOs will go to their boards and admit that they've been behind with their tech for years and it'd take a lot of stones to move to change the way things are done. We all know them: crappy pay, work conditions similar to the comedy shows about office work,etc.

Hmm... from personal experience I know that John Deere has multiple development centers around the world that definately do development on the edge of what is possible, and pushing that frontier... Disclaimer: Not in any associated/involved with John Deere.

>edge of what is possible, and pushing that frontier...

While I understand JD has been ahead of other tractor manufacturers (electric, autonomous), the industry hasn't been anywhere close to on pace with the research investments made in these areas where the consumer auto industry has actually been pushing the frontier in research investment in these spaces for some time now - seems more like riding the wave than contributing to "frontier pushing" from their comparative R&D investment in these areas.

That's not even to mention that it's not out of the imagination or even common experience to have a sitcom-tier office workplace where "interesting (to management)" teams are over-resourced while teams in charge of features that are less "interesting" but similarly important to user experience are under-resourced, seemingly in this case infosec. It's a common pattern of a company that may have lost sight of the customer, and in this case they exposed customer data.

Disclaimer: not related to JD, competitors, or research mentioned in this post, but have experience with JD tractors and them being years behind on engineering but years ahead on right-to-repair advocacy.

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#26

Post by p_l »

louis___ wrote: post #23
HEHENE wrote: post #2

Having worked on a John Deere integration for an agtech company I can't say I'm surprised. The MyJohnDeere API had a lot of idiosyncrasies that smelled like inexperienced or mismanaged development, especially around authentication/authorization. At the time I was working on it they had some extremely arcane authentication process that required round-trip emails, various link clicking and code entering, and all kinds…

> Really cool stuff happening in agtech. I don't know if I agree with you. These kind of agtech farms tend to get heavy on pesticides use and tillage, which on the long term kills the ground life. And it leaves the farmers' hands tied when a bug happens : https://www.vice.com/en/article/xykkkd/why-american-farmers-...

They tend to be because it's cheap and easy to be this way.

Meanwhile they are also the biggest levers if appropriately motivated (whether by extra legal or legal incentives) to use better solutions.

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#27

Post by kebman »

Is owning John Deere tractors somehow controversial, since they're talking about how owners were "doxed"? Is there a special place on the web where we can laugh at the hall of shame of John Deere tractor owners? Jokes aside, John Deere are pretty good tractors tho. Very common among farmers here in Norway. ^^

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#28

Post by Black101 »

kebman wrote: post #27

Is owning John Deere tractors somehow controversial, since they're talking about how owners were "doxed"? Is there a special place on the web where we can laugh at the hall of shame of John Deere tractor owners? Jokes aside, John Deere are pretty good tractors tho. Very common among farmers here in Norway. ^^

John Deere tractor owners have to be especially good at fixing stuff if they want to fix their own machinery, because like Phone manufacturers, John Deer try to block their customers from fixing their own machines.

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#29

Post by ourmandave »

trollied wrote: post #3

I’m not surprised by this. They’ve made themselves a target because of their Right To Repair shenanigans. https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/320183-john-deere-fa...

How is doxing some guy who bought a tractor sticking it to JD?

That's just a hacker being an asshole.

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#30

Post by DavidPeiffer »

bane wrote: post #15

For those in the big tech scene...it's not so weird to have technology in farm equipment. In fact, I just listened to a podcast about a software developer who had spent time working for the welding division of caterpillar where they worked on some R&D problems over the last 40 years that are still not solved.

I'd be curious for the podcast link if you have it handy.
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