Hackers make hay? Smart tractors vulnerable to full takeover

Researchers have figured out how to simultaneously spy on tens of thousands of smart tractors around the world, and even take full control over any of them.

Smart farming is on the rise, in an effort to enhance farming practices by improving efficiency, reducing labor costs, and optimizing resources. Tractors are thus increasingly equipped with advanced technologies like GPS, sensors, and artificial intelligence, which enable them to operate autonomously in some cases, or be controlled remotely. In their most basic form, there’s still someone inside the vehicle, but the tractor is connected to the cloud in order to get real-time weather data or location information, among other things.

At this year’s Black Hat USA event in Las Vegas, Felix Eberstaller and Bernhard Rader of Limes Security GmbH will reveal the unprecedented access they obtained to connected tractors across the world, particularly in Asia and Europe. They did so through the FJD AT2, a particularly vulnerable aftermarket steering system developed by Chinese manufacturer FJDynamics.

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