Car Hacking

Computers in cars have allowed for a myriad of possibilities which simply didn't exist in analog automobiles: better fuel efficiency, much greater horsepower-to-weight ratio, active traction control, automated real-time navigation systems... The improvements are too numerous to list here. Unfortunately, you can add another to that list, and it's not an improvement: car hacking.

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.”

That's right, the annoying little shits can now hack into your car -- while you're driving it. How? Well, there are a plethora of access points in modern vehicles: Bluetooth-connected cell phones, wifi, OnStar... It's not a matter of "if" they can get into your car's computer, it's what they'll do when they get there. None of the choices are good ones. That eight-mile-per-gallon V-8 with a six-pack and four on the floor is starting to look pretty good again...