Wireless car hacking due to poor security
Research from the University of California San Diego and the University of Washington - and which concludes that modern cars are susceptible to wireless hacking - is the result of a security issues being ignored at the car electronics software design stage, say Fortify Software.
With the latest cars now coming with as many as 50 or more interconnected computer systems - controlling everything from the brakes to the door locks and ignition system - now that the vehicles are becoming wirelessly-enabled, they are a lot easier to electronically hack into.
"It's interesting to see that the researchers have identified that most cars built since the late 1990s have a computer diagnostic port, since this port needs direct physical access to operate and therefore hack. But now these systems are being wirelessly enabled and held together with several tens of megabytes of code, it's a relatively small step to modify the code and allow hackers an easy - and wireless - back door into a car's computer system," said Barmak Meftah, CPO at Fortify Software.
