New Targets for Hackers: Your Car and Your House
By NICK BILTON, NYT
Imagine driving on the freeway at 60 miles per hour and your car suddenly screeches to a halt, causing a pileup that injures dozens of people. Now imagine you had absolutely nothing to do with the accident because your car was taken over by hackers.
Charlie Miller, a security researcher at Twitter, and Chris Valasek, director of security intelligence at IOActive, a security research company, recently demonstrated car hacks at the DefCon computer security conferences in Las Vegas. The researchers completely disabled a driver’s ability to control a vehicle. No brakes. Distorted steering. All with a click of a button. While the demos were with hybrid cars, researchers warn that dozens of modern vehicles could be susceptible.
Hackers and security researchers are moving away from simply trying to break into — or protect — people’s e-mail accounts, stealing credit cards and other dirty digital deeds. Now they’re exploring vulnerabilities to break through the high-tech security of homes, cause car accidents or in some extreme cases, kill people who use implanted medical devices.
“Once any single computer in a car is compromised, safety of the vehicle goes out the window,” Mr. Miller said in an e-mail interview. Modern cars typically have 10 to 40 little computers in them.
(More here.)
Imagine driving on the freeway at 60 miles per hour and your car suddenly screeches to a halt, causing a pileup that injures dozens of people. Now imagine you had absolutely nothing to do with the accident because your car was taken over by hackers.
Charlie Miller, a security researcher at Twitter, and Chris Valasek, director of security intelligence at IOActive, a security research company, recently demonstrated car hacks at the DefCon computer security conferences in Las Vegas. The researchers completely disabled a driver’s ability to control a vehicle. No brakes. Distorted steering. All with a click of a button. While the demos were with hybrid cars, researchers warn that dozens of modern vehicles could be susceptible.
Hackers and security researchers are moving away from simply trying to break into — or protect — people’s e-mail accounts, stealing credit cards and other dirty digital deeds. Now they’re exploring vulnerabilities to break through the high-tech security of homes, cause car accidents or in some extreme cases, kill people who use implanted medical devices.
“Once any single computer in a car is compromised, safety of the vehicle goes out the window,” Mr. Miller said in an e-mail interview. Modern cars typically have 10 to 40 little computers in them.
(More here.)
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