Now Cars Too Can Be Hacked - Revealed At Las Vegas Hacking Conference

Everything is becoming connected now-a-days. You can stay connected with your computer, laptop, Mobile phones, home network through internet or WiFi. Even you can stay connected with your modern cars that are equipped with technologies that helps you connect your phone or any digital device with connectivity with your car. And as Everything is connected, this connectivity makes your car vulnerable to hackers.

Yes, you heard it right now your car can be hacked and control can be taken by hackers, that will make you go crazy. This thing is made possible by two hackers, Charlie Miller, a security engineer at Twitter, and Chris Valasek, director of security intelligence at IOActive, received an $80,000 grant from DARPA to research how they could hack into the computer systems, called Electronic Control Units (ECU), used in modern cars and see what they could do once they gained access. The following video show how they hacked a car.

What they can do when gained access to your car? Well, everything :

• Disabling breaks while car is moving
• Control the steering wheel
• Accelerating
• Stopping the engine
• Yanking the seat belts
• Display fake speedometer and gauge reading
• Turning on and off lights
• And blowing horn.

They were able to do this by hooking a laptop to the ECU network and commanding the computer to perform diverse actions by injecting rogue signals into it. These two researchers released their research papers explaining how they managed to take control of the car and how they kept that control even after their computer was unhooked from the ECU. The cars used for implementing this attack were 2010 Ford Escape and 2010 Toyota Prius. The main Goal of their research was to see how far hackers can go when gained control of the car.

Because all cars today are fully electronically equipped and controlled, the threat of them being hacked is very much possible. The amount of effort required for a very skilled hacker to gain access to anybody’s car is much higher than trying to steal credit card information. Maybe in the future, as cars become even more automated and more connected to traffic networks, this could become an issue, but for now, it is safe to say that highways are virus free.