Their trains were stalled. These hackers brought them back to life.
WARSAW—It’s a nightmare for any laptop user when the innards go haywire and the device freezes up irreversibly—a disaster called “bricking." Now imagine it happening to a 175-ton passenger train. It began with Dolnośląskie Rail, which functions as a sort of MTA of southwest Poland. Much of its rolling stock had been made by the Polish company Newag.
After ferrying millions of passengers over the years, about a dozen of the railway’s trains needed to be refurbished. Dolnośląskie gave Newag a shot at the job, but also solicited other bids. The railway decided it stood to save at least one million złoty ($255,118) by going with a Newag competitor known as SPS.
By April 2022, the run-of-the-mill maintenance was supposed to make the trains good as new. Or so everyone thought. Without warning, nearly all of the refurbished trains began “selectively, but permanently" failing, said the railway’s lawyer, Mirosław Eulenfeld.
Dolnośląskie worried that the region would be paralyzed if any more trains stalled. SPS technicians tried tinkering with the trains’ mechanical systems to no avail. It became apparent that the faults stemmed from the main computer, which wouldn’t let the engines start.
They were flummoxed. “None of us could focus," said Monika Mieczkowska, the daughter of SPS’s owner, with a deadline to deliver the trains quickly looming. While on a family vacation in Spain, she came up with the idea of googling “Polish hackers." She emailed a group that called itself “Dragon Sector," and soon after, a trio of hackers reported for duty.
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