Even John Deere tractors aren’t safe from jailbreaking and hacker attacks


The electronics of John Deere tractors can be hacked, and what better way to demonstrate this than to have them run a corn-themed version of Doom on the display.
An Australian hacker going by the name Sick Codes has shown off their work, which has motives dating back more than a year.
Last year, during DEF CON 29, Sick Codes said he wanted to explore vulnerabilities in agricultural equipment, as no one else was doing it at the time. While he did manage to force the company into fixing a few issues, the way John Deere approached the situation was to essentially block people from customizing their gear or fixing their own issues.
Anti-right-to-repair
Sick Codes saw this as “anti-right-to-repair”, which didn’t sit well with him.
So, this year, during the same conference – DEF CON 30 – he demonstrated what is essentially a jailbreak, showcasing how people could bypass John Deere’s blocks and still end up customizing and improving their gear.
Sick Codes says he used a John Deere tractor 4240 touchscreen controller with an Arm-compatible NXP I.MX 6 system-on-chip, running Wind River Linux 8. Some devices were running Windows CE, as well. The project took a couple of months, and involved physically modifying the equipment, to have it run the code. If a person is capable of getting new software onto the endpoints (opens in new tab), they’d be able to run it freely.
“The main bug is that nothing’s encrypted or checksummed properly or anything like that,” the researcher explained, further stating that patching the weakness isn’t exactly simple. Instead, the company should build new devices with proper security baked in, he says.
All the firmware’s code runs as root, he concluded.
TechRadar Pro has sked John Deere for a comment and will if we hear back.
Via: The Register (opens in new tab)
Audio player loading… The electronics of John Deere tractors can be hacked, and what better way to demonstrate this than to have them run a corn-themed version of Doom on the display. An Australian hacker going by the name Sick Codes has shown off their work, which has motives dating…
Recent Posts
- Building intelligent infrastructure for a truly connected economy
- 100 Best Prime Day Deals Under $100 (2025): LifeStraws, Tech, and More
- Using AI might actually slow down experienced devs
- Grok searches for Elon Musk’s opinion before answering tough questions
- The next leap for the technology sector: quantum computing
Archives
- July 2025
- June 2025
- May 2025
- April 2025
- March 2025
- February 2025
- January 2025
- December 2024
- November 2024
- October 2024
- September 2024
- August 2024
- July 2024
- June 2024
- May 2024
- April 2024
- March 2024
- February 2024
- January 2024
- December 2023
- November 2023
- October 2023
- September 2023
- August 2023
- July 2023
- June 2023
- May 2023
- April 2023
- March 2023
- February 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- November 2022
- October 2022
- September 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022