Researchers Show Possibility For “Car Hacking”

With our lives becoming increasingly connected by electronic technology it is only matter of time before everything becomes “hackable”. At the DEF CON 21 security convention experts revealed just how easy it is to hack cars and that it isn’t something that is far-fetched and reserved only for Sci-Fi films.

At the conference security engineer Charlie Miller and IOActive Director of Security Intelligence Chris Valasek demonstrated it was possibly to drive a car from a laptop including: taking over the steering, controlling acceleration, adjusting seat belt controls, turning the engine on or off, honking the horn and manipulating the console to show false speeds.

According to Forbes the tests were run on a 2010 Ford Escape and a Toyota Prius but the “vulnerabilities” of cars to hacking certainly don’t stop with those two models or manufacturers. The attacks show the vulnerabilities of current cars: the large number of sensors on them can be blocked via a denial-of-service attack while spoofing can be used to make them retrieve arbitrary data. With even more electronically controlled cars coming in the future the possibility to take them over completely becomes a viable and worrying option.

Ford and Toyota both responded with Ford saying they take these new developments seriously while Toyota said that they were unrealistic and not representative of real hacking. Toyota stated they believe their cars are fully protected against wireless hacking.

You can see the full video below.

Image courtesy of Forbes