[ThrowawayIP]

Honestly, that would be the much more dangerous attack to a company that must meet torque specs for safety. You can throw out a torque wrench, recalling already produced products on the other hand...

"We've hacked your torque wrenches since adoption & changed the torque values to deceive your Quality Control on random random bolts on random aircraft. Pay us ransom to tell you which fasteners on which products were changed or recall them all."

Re-torquing every bolt on an aircraft would be ungodly expensive.

[Xirgil]

Pretty sure in this scenario they'd have to recall them all anyways, because regulators and the public would not trust hackers to accurately log and report every bolt they messed with.

[usrusr]

I could easily imagine an email arriving at some public contact address "I'm in your wrenches, changing your torques, send 123 BTC to 45678 or else!" and some first level person just dismissing it incredulously, "yeah, right...", to the trash folder. Then when nice things do start to burn... not sure that I'd have the guts to remember if I was that first level person?

But when bit ignored that threat would be easy to deal with, just get some indicator beam type torque wrenches and occasionally check what the dial tells you about the point the trigger-type triggers.