What if your car was hacked and infected with malware?
(Photo credit - Flickr’s Andraseal)
As the number of electronic gadgets and gizmos built into our automobiles grow (from sat-navs and media players to sensors and diagnostics), so do the risks of our cars being hacked and infected.
In 2010, a team of researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California at San Diego ran a script on a computer connected to a car which took total control of the car, demonstrating a 60-second countdown on the dashboard before killing the engine.
MIT Technology Review reports:
The way manufacturers build cars may make it difficult for them to identify security vulnerabilities on their own… Modern cars are put together with electronic parts from numerous third parties, which makes it hard to weed out hardware glitches.
With automobile manufacturers now turning cars into wireless hotspots, it’s not hard to imagine how cyber-criminals and hackers could potentially take control of many cars at once remotely. It sort of reminds me of ATMOS from Doctor Who…!
Creepy.
(Source: technologyreview.com)
