Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway

[V_R]

I WAS DRIVING 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold.

Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched to the local hip hop station and began blaring Skee-lo at full volume. I spun the control knob left and hit the power button, to no avail. Then the windshield wipers turned on, and wiper fluid blurred the glass.

As I tried to cope with all this, a picture of the two hackers performing these stunts appeared on the car’s digital display: Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, wearing their trademark track suits. A nice touch, I thought.

The Jeep’s strange behavior wasn’t entirely unexpected. I’d come to St. Louis to be Miller and Valasek’s digital crash-test dummy, a willing subject on whom they could test the car-hacking research they’d been doing over the past year. The result of their work was a hacking technique—what the security industry calls a zero-day exploit—that can target Jeep Cherokees and give the attacker wireless control, via the Internet, to any of thousands of vehicles. Their code is an automaker’s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.

To better simulate the experience of driving a vehicle while it’s being hijacked by an invisible, virtual force, Miller and Valasek refused to tell me ahead of time what kinds of attacks they planned to launch from Miller’s laptop in his house 10 miles west. Instead, they merely assured me that they wouldn’t do anything life-threatening. Then they told me to drive the Jeep onto the highway. “Remember, Andy,” Miller had said through my iPhone’s speaker just before I pulled onto the Interstate 64 on-ramp, “no matter what happens, don’t panic.”1

Continue reading: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/

 

[V_R]

That is not good!

 

[Taffycat]

That is not good!

Having your car remotely hi-jacked has to be amongst one of the scariest things that could happen to a driver.

 

[V_R]

Indeed, the guy in the video knew it was going to happen and he still wet himself when the engine died.

Must admit, I didn't think it was the best place to demonstrate what they can do, killing the car in the fast lane of the interstate, and the only way the driver can regain control is but turning the ignition off and back on...

 

[Taffycat]

It's hard to understand why they would not have used either a racing circuit (hired for the purpose of the test) or, maybe a disused airfield, etc. There would surely have been some safer place to run their experiment, without endangering lives and potentially causing a highway pile-up.

 

[Abarbarian]

It's hard to understand why they would not have used either a racing circuit (hired for the purpose of the test) or, maybe a disused airfield, etc. There would surely have been some safer place to run their experiment, without endangering lives and potentially causing a highway pile-up.

Well in the first place they are young, they are also americans, they have to be geeks(geeks are strange folk).The guy who drove the car must be missing a grey cell or two as,

This wasn’t the first time Miller and Valasek had put me behind the wheel of a compromised car.