Gadgetory

as recently as five years ago reports of cars being hacked we're out there but they reviewed is either apocryphal or just unlikely to scale then this drumbeat of headlines began March 2011 UC San Diego and University of Washington teams they're able to hack into a mainstream production car via its cellular data connection getting access to drive system May 2013 Nitsa establishes its first team to monitor car hacks and develop standards against them that are still pending August 2013 Charlie Miller and Chris valasek get into the backbone of a 2010 Prius and 2010 Ford Escape in a demonstration that they do through the obd2 port which is in every car made since 96 they get access to steering braking displays and more summer 2014 a teenager spends 15 bucks at RadioShack and is reportedly able to remotely unlock and start a car at the Battelle cyber Auto challenge apparently not much of a challenge for him August 2014 prowl LinkedIn and you'll find job listings like this one from Ford that reads almost like one from a defense contract in February of 2015 in Sausalito California a thief appears to walk by a locked car holding some kind of device that isn't the key but it still unlocks it and he steals a fifteen thousand dollar racing bike from the back a typical new car today has maybe a hundred micro processors in it networked together by Al and teaming with a lot of shared information that passes by most of those chips all of this given shape by up to a hundred million lines of software code these are cyber physical systems so effectively when you're in your car you're in a computer with wheels but what is the robustness and the resiliency of that entity probably far less than the laptop that you can sitting on the table at home Mary Aiken is a cyber psychologist and real-life inspiration for the new show CSI cyber that CBS just launched on Wednesday nights I'm a cyber cop her concerns underline four things going on in the connected car the processors and networks increasingly control important stuff a car systems are increasingly interconnected get into one part of the cars electronics and you may be on your way to getting into the rest third these systems are increasingly exposed to wireless interfaces from a wireless key that can remote start your car to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for streaming and hotspots and built-in cellular radios that power the car's telematics or concierge service and finally the internet as with everything else connected via it it's a non proprietary shared infrastructure intoxicatingly powerful in ficient and scalable but shared is shared that means good guys and bad and unlike our personal computers we're just about no two are alike with different software settings security software configurations and so many parameters vehicles tend to be pretty homogenous add to that waves of cars heading to showrooms this year with apple carplay or Android auto installed potentially setting the table for yet another layer of common hack efficiency hack one the fear goes and hack them all and with cars on us roads currently at a historic high of eleven point four years old average whatever vulnerabilities are going out there will likely remain there for a long time more car tech demystified right now at CNET on cars comm click on car tech 101