Hackers demonstrate Toyota Prius hijacking on video
The two hackers who last month announced plans to reveal details concerning how to hack a Toyota Prius and Ford Escape have gotten together with Andy Greenberg from Forbes to demonstrate the technique and just how much trouble they can cause once they have hijacked a vehicle’s computers.
In the video below, Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller get into the backseat of a Prius with a dismantled dashboard and ask Greenberg to start driving. The two hackers are giddy in the backseat as they cycle through a series of attacks that trigger various functions of the car.
The hackers were able to cause a variety of events to occur that ranged from mildly annoying to potentially dangerous. Seemingly with the push of a button from the back seat, the Prius’s horn sounded, and the seat belt’s snapped tight against the chests of the passengers. Most of the attacks operate by tricking the car into thinking that an incident is occurring. For instance, the seatbelts can be suddenly made taught using the vehicle’s pre-collision system by ‘forging’ that the car is about to be in a crash.
