How Hackable Is Your Car?
Fortunately my 2007 Jetta is not on the list. Didn't expect it to be either, of course, but this is one of the reasons I have serious misgivings about these features in a car. Not a fan of "the internet of things" in any case. It seems to me the risks far outweigh the benefits.
Last year, when hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek showed they could hijack the steering and brakes of a Ford Escape and a Toyota Prius with nothing but laptops connected to the cars, they raised two questions: Could hackers perform the same tricks wirelessly, or even over the Internet? And even more pressing: Is your specific car vulnerable, too?
If you own a Cadillac Escalade, a Jeep Cherokee or an Infiniti Q50, you may not like the answer.
In a talk today at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas—and an accompanying 92-page paper—Valasek and Miller will present the results of a broad analysis of dozens of different car makes and models, assessing the vehicles’ schematics for the signs that hint at vulnerabilities to auto-focused hackers. The result is a kind of handbook of ratings and reviews of automobiles for the potential hackability of their networked components. “For 24 different cars, we examined how a remote attack might work,” says Valasek, director of vehicle security research at the security consultancy IOActive. “It really depends on the architecture: If you hack the radio, can you send messages to the brakes or the steering? And if you can, what can you do with them?”
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/car-hacking-chart/
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