Automakers trying to prevent hackers from commandeering cars - nwitimes.com
DETROIT (AP) — When researchers at two West Coast universities took control of a General Motors car through cellular and Bluetooth connections in 2010, they startled the auto industry by exposing a glaring security gap. Five years later, two friendly hackers sitting on a living room couch used a laptop computer to commandeer a Jeep from afar over the Internet, demonstrating an even scarier vulnerability. "Cars don't seem to be any more secure than when the university guys did it," says Charlie Miller, a security expert at Twitter who, along with well-known hacker and security consultant Chris Valasek, engineered the attack on the Jeep Cherokee. And experts and lawmakers are warning the auto industry and regulators to move faster to plug holes created by the dozens of new computers and the growing number of Internet connections in today's automobiles. But the episode raised the prospect that someone with malicious intent could commandeer a car with a laptop and make it suddenly stop, accelerate or turn, injuring or killing someone. "The adversary only needs to find one way to compromise the system, where a defender needs to protect against all ways," says Yoshi Kohno, associate. Source: www.nwitimes.com
