The use of the Internet on cars has seen some increasing worry about hacking of cars. The area has been of concern to the FBI and one state, Michigan, has already put measures to counter any hacking attempts on cars. Now, a report by some of the experts at the hacking who were at the world largest hacking convention says that car companies ought to be careful and afraid and should be concerned by the situation. They say that these kind of hacks could result in serious damage of cars.
Kevin Tighe, the senior systems engineer at Bugcrowd said that nowadays companies were now realizing the fact that they are simply selling a big computer that users sit in and drive. He is one of the leading researchers who was at the Defcon 24, the hacking convention which was held in Las Vegas. The convention had a considerable number of people who were discussing wide ranging issues of hacking including the latest in car hacking breakthroughs.
One of the car hacking possibilities which was raised was the issue of jamming of sensors and self driving cars. One worrying attack was that of the Tesla autopilot which led the computer program to think it could not detect anything because there was nothing in front of it, instead of activating a sense of security.
One other important issue brought up at the convention was of the systems which were said to have strong safety features. The problem was not if they truly had strong safety but rather if they could be easily removed.
Two of the hackers said that they had been able to discover that instead of overwriting the individual settings of the car, they could simply mimic the car’s controls and thus take control of the car. The revelations means that instead of putting the test Jeep in a diagnostic mode, they could simply make the changes they needed to do during a standard drive.
Car hacking is seen as one of the most worrying cases of hacking out there. There is also rapidly growing interest of the area involved by researchers in able to keep the attacks to a minimum. Not all car hacking is malicious however.
Just last month, another hacking convention was held New York City, named the Planet Earth Convention. Present at the convention was Eric Evenchick, who created the open source tool, the CANtact. He said that in some cases, consumers preferred to hack their own cars so that they could increase the car’s performance or the make some fine tune power steering settings.
However some analysts argue that hackers will not get substantial reward by hacking into a cars computer system and playing with it. Most criminal activity would mostly center on actually stealing the vehicle. Evenchick said one issue that was supposed to be discussed was risk and motive.