By Mike Sheldrick
Now that cars have become rolling laptops — or tablets, or smartphones, take your pick — it’s becoming increasingly clear that automakers have yet to get a handle on fully protecting their products from hackers.
In the latest incident, a car thief equipped with a laptop was able to steal a Jeep Wrangler. Hacking has become the 21st century’s carjacking.
A YouTube video, uploaded by Crimestoppers in an effort to identify the thief, hasn’t quite gone viral yet, but it has garnered nearly 200,000 views.
This particular incident may have been an inside job. Dealers are able to recode keys, so the perp could have gotten access to this ability while working at a dealership.
Nevertheless, this is just the latest in a series of worrisome incidents over the last couple of years. The most unnerving might have been the incident where a couple of hackers demonstrated that they could remotely penetrate a Jeep’s control system, and drove it into a ditch — just to show that it could be done.
That lark forced Fiat-Chrysler to recall 1.4 million vehicles. Other victimized automakers include Tesla, Mitsubishi, and Nissan.
Stoking some of the recent fear was a recent FBI public service announcement warning about the danger.
To be sure, no less an authoritative source than Scientific American has tried to tamp down some of the concern, in an article earlier this year that suggested everyone should calm down.
Indeed, ever since the advent of electronic engine controls in 1980s, automakers have used “firewalls” to prevent modifications to the algorithm running the engine. Since then, many critical automobile systems have come under digital control, such as brakes and steering, all of them, presumably, behind a firewall.
But as often been demonstrated, the more that control and decision making has been turned over to electronics, the more likely that there will be unforeseen accidents. Google and Tesla recently demonstrated that so-called “smart” algorithmic control can produce unanticipated results.
Vehicles have yet to be widely connected electronically to each other, although that is the vision for the future. At that point, the stakes and the potential for chaos, will be higher. One can certainly imagine terrorists would attempt to create traffic jams more crippling, and deadlier, than we ourselves have achieved.
Cybersecurity will get a full airing at a conference in Detroit later this month.
