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Hacking the Farm: Breaking Badly into Agricultural Devices

Sick Codes

Sick Codes demonstrates tractor-sized hardware hacking on John Deere display consoles, extracting firmware, bypassing locks, and running Doom on farm machinery.

Summary

The Right to Repair and Agricultural Equipment Security

Modern agricultural machinery relies heavily on proprietary embedded electronic control units and telematics displays that lock farmers out of self-repair and diagnostic workflows.

Hardware Hacking John Deere Touchscreen Consoles

Sick Codes demonstrates physical hardware attack vectors on John Deere display terminals—including glitching, desoldering flash memory, and extracting embedded Linux filesystems.

Duplicating, Emulating, and Modifying Farm Firmware

The author shows how extracted firmware images can be modified, re-flashed, and emulated in QEMU to bypass digital rights management and diagnostic restrictions.

Advancing Agricultural Right-to-Repair Legislation

The presentation emphasizes the critical intersection between firmware security research, food supply resilience, and legislative right-to-repair initiatives.

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