Hackers Will Soon Want Your Car

Hackers can infiltrate just about anything that's made up of zeros and ones, it seems. And that will include your car once it is hooked into the Internet in the not-to-distant future.

Robert Charette, a risk management expert and writer of The Risk Factor blog on IEEE Spectrum's website, posted an item on Monday about a paper that will be presented at the 31st IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. The money quote from the paper, which Charette highlights:

Over a range of experiments, both in the lab and in road tests, we demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input-- including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on.

By the way, adversarially is a nice way to say "do damaging things that can lead to a crash."

Automobile cybersecurity got ramped up last week when the New York Times published an article on the apper, reporting that "while modern cars have extensive safety engineering in the design of their computer control systems, little thought has been given to the potential threat of hackers who may want to take over the networks that increasingly control modern cars."

Sound familiar? The decades-old argument in government IT circles has been that cybersecurity has always been tacked on to a system after design and sometimes even after development, making it much harder to secure the system. Now car manufacturers seem to have done the same.

But this will be just an extension of what has been a series of hacks against car systems already, points out Charette, who has written for Government Executive magazine and Nextgov:

Hacking into cars' electronic systems is not new, of course. Almost since car electronic systems have appeared, people have been trying to exploit them, for instance, by hacking into cars' wireless key systems or into cars' ECUs to boost engine output. Hacking GM's On-Star system seems especially popular.