Ransomware plows through farm machinery giant AGCO US agricultural machinery maker AGCO is the latest high-profile organization to fall victim to ransomware, which it says affects operations at some of its worldwide production facilities. Factory of Massey Ferguson tractor production line at AGCO agricultural machinery plant in Canoas, Rio Grande do Sul Massey Ferguson …
Who?
Russia? March 2022 - "AGCO Agriculture Foundation Donates to Ukraine Emergency Relief" - https://www.fendt.com/int/agco-agriculture-foundation-donates-to-ukraine-emergency-rel
And then there's John Deere who have interesting business practices - https://www.freeict.eu/news/john-deere-restrictive-practices-hinder-maintenance-for-farmers - despite calling themselves "one of World's Most Ethical Companies". See some of the comments on https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2022/05/02/ukrainian_tractors_deere/
UK Government? "Tory MP's friend 'can see' how he went from tractors to p*rn site" - https://metro.co.uk/2022/05/01/tory-mps-friend-can-see-how-he-went-from-tractors-to-porn-site-16566918/
Or just some chancers.
What?
I would be very surprised if the outages only impact their production systems.
I'm now wondering how John Deere implement their Tractor DRM(r) and whether it is vulnerable to this sort of thing - one hopes its not so rubbish as to be a white-list, and the tractor bricks itself if it doesn't get a thumbs up within three tries of the server or something. That could bring the whole lot to a standstill. Hopefully they have contingencies in place.
Probably. FWIW, there was a news report that Russian forces that stole John Deere tmfarm equipment from Ukrainian dealerships found them inoperable when they took them back to Russia.
I believe another commentard described it as "even a broken watch is right twice a day".
Lots of ransomware targeting food production and food distribution lately - including stuff well outside of the Russia/Ukraine sphere. A rash of mysterious problems like fires and other issues shutting down multiple distribution hubs in the west US since the beginning of the year.
Maybe coincidence, or maybe someone is trying to make the inflation problem with food worse for their own reasons.
Snopes had a look into this recently but saw no 'new trend'. A list of 16 incidences in 6 months isn't much of a 'disaster'. The list included abandoned buildings, a butcher's shop, 'recent' being 2 years, etc
Probably down to headline writers looking for easy puns... 'toast', 'fried'...
The number of fires at food distribution plants is not abnormal. The news tend to latch on to a story and amplify it. I am not sure you remember several years ago in the US it was the "summer of the shark". The news reported on shark attacks quite often. But the reality was the actual shark attacks were below normal. The news moved on, but shark attacks still happen.
The same thing is going here with food plant fires. Just because something is being reported on more does not mean it is happening more. According to this tweet, there are 27,728 food processing plants in the US. I think I saw that there were 24 fires. If that is correct, then only 0.09% have caught fire.
Just because something is reported on more does not mean it is happening more; also, just because something is reported on less does not mean it is happening less.
They've bought up plenty of other companies, that make various agricultural machines, silos, dryers, conveyers, and so on. Worldwide.
It's affecting a LOT of production. I know someone who works for a company that was bought up by AGCO.
A pint, because the IT guys fighting the problem will need a few.
" that effectively holds their customers to ransom when it comes to maintaining products"
The interesting thing is that while there is a small and highly vocal group of ex JD customers (or soon-to-be-ex) loudly criticising the model, their sales have increased because almost all their customers love the stuff they're doing. Farming is mostly big commercial business these days, and what they offer fits perfectly with that while deeply pissing off the relatively few remaining diehard independents.
If you buy a million dollar tractor, and hire a guy on $30k a year to operate it, would _you_ want him fiddling with the thing if it breaks down? On the other hand, if you buy _yourself_ a million dollar tractor, and you can't fiddle with it yourself, how pissed off would you be? I'd be annoyed enough to buy another brand.
Apparently the real problem isn't that JD have come up with something unacceptable to a few farmers, but that those farmers are JD fanboys and won't just go and buy the competing model from another manufacturer :)
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