oko-press

Wednesday, August 28th, marked the beginning of the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the Polish train manufacturer Newag against train maintenance yard Serwis Pojazdow Szynowych and experts from the Dragon Sector group, who revealed weird software locks in Impuls-series trains. The company demands almost six million Polish złotys (about 1.4mln EUR) compensation. Surprisingly, it also admits that the hackers did not modify software in on-board controllers.

In late 2023 Onet and Zaufana Trzecia Strona wrote about Impuls multiple-unit trains that were rendered inoperable. I wrote about this for OKO.press in December that year. For years Newag-manufactured trains experienced suspicious breakdowns, becoming inoperable often after maintenance performed by third-party maintenance yards like Serwis Pojazdów Szynowych (SPS).

Telegram is a popular – especially in the East – internet messenger. It bills itself as “encrypted”, “private”, and “secure”. One of its creators (and the CEO of the company that operates the service), Pavel Durov, has for years been suggesting, in a more or less direct manner, that other internet messenger services expose our conversations and endanger our privacy.

It’s a pretty crude, yet surprisingly effective strategy for distracting attention away from Telegram’s very real problems with security and privacy. And there are quite a few of those.