Hackers Reveal How to Hack into a Car & Do Nasty Things

I just blogged about how hackers have revealed one can hack into an iPhone or an iPad in less than 60 seconds. Now here is another type of hacking that you should be thinking about: hacking into cars.

According to this article on Frobes.com, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek plan to release their findings and the attack software they developed at the hacker conference Defcon in Las Vegas next month. Their goal is to help other researchers find and fix the auto industry’s security problems before malicious hackers get under the hoods of unsuspecting drivers.

Hers’ a quote from the author if the article.

As I drove their vehicles for more than an hour, Miller and Valasek showed that they’ve reverse-engineered enough of the software of the Escape and the Toyota Prius (both the 2010 model) to demonstrate a range of nasty surprises: everything from annoyances like uncontrollably blasting the horn to serious hazards like slamming on the Prius’ brakes at high speeds. They sent commands from their laptops that killed power steering, spoofed the GPS and made pathological liars out of speedometers and odometers. Finally they directed me out to a country road, where Valasek showed that he could violently jerk the Prius’ steering at any speed, threatening to send us into a cornfield or a head-on collision. “Imagine you’re driving down a highway at 80 ,” Valasek says. “You’re going into the car next to you or into oncoming traffic. That’s going to be bad times.”

You can watch the video and read this interesting article here.