By now, almost everyone is aware of cybersecurity hacks on banks, businesses, medical facilities, and so on, as hackers seek to exploit weaknesses everywhere. However, the threats posed by hackers to cars are still relatively unknown, but the risks are growing as our vehicles become increasingly connected via apps, the Internet, or even charging stations.
Says Stephen Meagher, director of new product offerings at Deloitte, to The Financial Post, “All new vehicles for the past five or six years have been coming out with some level of intelligence and connectivity. What we’re moving very rapidly towards, whether it’s with EVs or even with an internal combustion engine, is what we call a software-defined vehicle, where a lot more of the operations, the capabilities, are in the software rather than the mechanics of the vehicle.” With this increasingly reliance on software, which can involve millions of lines of code, the risk of bugs or exploits also grows, giving greater opportunities for hackers to find weaknesses of which they can take advantage. For EVs, which are reliant on publicly accessible charging stations, the risk is even higher.
To date, while no widespread attacks have been identified, small scale demonstrations of how these vehicles can be hacked have occurred under mostly controlled conditions, whether it be via remotely controlling a Jeep in 2015, exploiting the TeslaMate app to unlock doors and honk horns on multiple vehicles, or gaining access to a Tesla via Bluetooth in a hacking competition. As to the near-term risks, says Meagher to The Financial Post, “Large-scale access to and control of vehicles is something that is a threat but that has yet to come to fruition. We do feel that manufacturers and governments are taking some better control of what is happening in this environment, and it is progressing every day.”
Source:
https://financialpost.com/cybersecurity/why-connected-cars-next-frontier-cybersecurity
