Hacked Tractor Runs Doom

The latest installment of “Can It Run Doom?” has some unusual twists. The hacking of John Deere tractor screens brings both legal and societal implications.

You’d be wrong to assume tractors are not high-tech items: modern internet-connected models can include features from auto-steering to 3D mapping to sensors that gather data about crop yields and soil moisture to help plan future planting and gathering.

That’s led to ongoing debates and even lawsuits about whether John Deere owners have enough control over how they can get components fixed or replaced and how this fits in to right-to-repair laws.

Of course, where there’s proprietary software, there’s somebody trying to jailbreak systems. A researcher who prefers to be known as Sick Codes spent several months working on the John Deere user interface and the underlying Linux system.

The researcher eventually succeeded and, with a modder using the name Skelegant, got the tractor display running a farming-themed variant of Doom for a demonstration at the Def Con security conference.

What makes this more than a fun prank is that Sick Codes was able to get root access, albeit through hardware modifications to the circuit board. On the one hand, that could make it easier for farmers to get round limitations on self-repair.

On the other hand, the root access makes it that little easier for malicious hackers to abuse remote access. It’s still a bit of a stretch to imagine a hostile foreign power deliberately bricking farming equipment, but it’s not hard to image somebody wanting to disrupt the agricultural supply chain.