Web sites for customers of agricultural equipment maker John Deere contained vulnerabilities that could have allowed a remote attacker to harvest sensitive information on the company’s customers including their names, physical addresses and information on the Deere equipment they own and operate.
The researcher known as “Sick Codes” (@sickcodes) published two advisories on Thursday warning about the flaws in the myjohndeere.com web site and the John Deere Operations Center web site and mobile applications. In a conversation with Security Ledger, the researcher said that a he was able to use VINs (vehicle identification numbers) taken from a farm equipment auction site to identify the name and physical address of the owner. Furthermore, a flaw in the myjohndeere.com website could allow an unauthenticated user to carry out automated attacks against the site, possibly revealing all the user accounts for that site.
Sick Codes disclosed both flaws to John Deere and also to the U.S. Government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which monitors food and agriculture as a critical infrastructure sector. As of publication, the flaws discovered in the Operations Center have been addressed while the status of the myjohndeere.com flaws is not known.
Contacted by The Security Ledger, John Deere did not offer comment regarding the bulletins prior to publication.
Sick Codes, the researcher, said he created a free developer account with Deere and found the first myjohndeere.com vulnerability before he had even logged into the company’s web site. The two flaws he disclosed represent only an hour or two of probing the company’s website and Operations Center. He feels confident there is more to be found, including vulnerabilities affecting the hardware and software deployed inside the cabs of Deere equipment.
“You can download and upload stuff to tractors in the field from the web. That is a potential attack vector if exploitable.”
Ag Equipment Data: Fodder for Nation States
The information obtained from the John Deere websites, including customer names and addresses, could put the company afoul of data security laws like California’s CCPA or the Personal Information Protection Act in Deere’s home state of Illinois. However, the national security consequences of the company’s leaky website could be far greater. Details on what model combines and other equipment is in use on what farm could be of very high value to an attacker, including nation-states interested in disrupting U.S. agricultural production at key junctures, such as during planting or harvest time.
The consolidated nature of U.S. farming means that an attacker with knowledge of specific, Internet connected machinery in use by a small number of large-scale farming operations in the midwestern United States could launch targeted attacks on that equipment that could disrupt the entire U.S. food supply chain.
Despite creating millions of lines of software to run its sophisticated agricultural machinery, Deere has not registered so much as a single vulnerability with the Government’s CVE database, which tracks software flaws.
At Risk: Devastating Attacks on Food Chain
Agriculture is uniquely susceptible to such disruptions, says Molly Jahn, a Program Manager in the Defense Sciences Office at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
“Unlike many industries, there is extreme seasonality in the way John Deere’s implements are used,” Jahn told Security Ledger. “We can easily imagine timed interference with planting or harvest that could be devastating. And it wouldn’t have to persist for very long at the right time of year or during a natural disaster – a compound event.” An attack aimed at economic sabotage and carried out through combines at harvest time in the midwest it would be “devastating and unrecoverable depending on the details,” said Jahn.
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However, the Agriculture sector and firms that supply it, like Deere, lag other industries in cyber security preparedness and resilience. A 2019 report released by Department of Homeland Security concluded that the “adoption of advanced precision agriculture technology and farm information management systems in the crop and livestock sectors is introducing new vulnerabilities into an industry which had previously been highly mechanical in nature.”
DHS Report: Threats to Ag Not Taken Seriously
“Most of the information management / cyber threats facing precision agriculture’s embedded and digital tools are consistent with threat vectors in all other connected industries. Malicious actors are also generally the same: data theft, stealing resources, reputation loss, destruction of equipment, or gaining an improper financial advantage over a competitor,” the report read.
The research group that prepared that report visited large farms and precision agriculture technology manufacturers “located throughout the United States.” The report concluded that “potential threats to precision agriculture were often not fully understood or were not being treated seriously enough by the front-line agriculture producers,” the report concluded.
Jahn said the U.S. agriculture sector has emphasized efficiency and cost savings over resilience. The emergence of precision agriculture in the last 15 years has driven huge increases in productivity, but also introduced new risks of disruptions that have not been accounted for.
“We have not thought about protecting the data from unwanted interference of any type,” she said. “That includes industrial espionage, sabotage or a full on attack…I have consistently maintained cyber risk on the short list of existential threats to US food and agriculture system.”
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