GeneralCyber criminals can get access to car dashboard technology, control your vehicle

Cyber criminals can get access to car dashboard technology, control your vehicle

Smart cars and the dashboard technology they come with could be accessed by cyber criminals and put to the worst uses possible, warns Edmund King who serves as president of the AA which is Britain’s biggest motoring organization. As any Battlestar Galactica fan will warn you, connecting everything to Internet could end up being the doom of humankind.

Coming back to Earth, we don’t need another Heartbleed bug to tell us that the Internet is not the safest place in the world in which to dock the control mechanisms of your automobile. More and more luxury cars are the being sold with the ability to connect to wireless networks, enabling users to access traffic data, search the web, stream music, get news updates and so on.

Hyundai Car

As much as this is a step forward when it comes to technology, various studies have noted that it offers criminals and terrorists broader opportunities to steal information from such connected systems. Even worse, hackers can access control of the dashboard tech to remotely seize hold of the vehicle itself and cause it to crash by fiddling with its braking and acceleration.

Also see: 8 out of 10 Internet users have privacy concerns about wearable devices

Several experiments have proved that it’s possible for a criminal to remotely unlock a car’s doors, steer it to a certain degree, open its trunk, tinker with the speedometer and more, by hacking into the automobile’s Controller Area Network. Speaking of vehicles, Motherboard’s YouTube series titled Phreaked Out, takes a look at how two engineers brought Los Angeles to its knees in August 2006.

Two LA traffic engineers, Gabriel Murillo and Kartik Patel, tampered with the city’s traffic control system as part of a labor union protest. The result was days of gridlock on the streets of LA. The amount of danger we court by being dependent on technology to support important systems such as power plants, airways, dams, hospitals and so on is difficult to imagine because of its sheer magnitude.

The full article on cyber criminals and the ability to turn the dashboard technology found in smart cars against users, is available on The Times through this link.

Related Articles

Latest Posts