How secure is your car?
Obviously, security in autonomous vehicles is a serious issue, but new studies released today are showing how automotive hacking is on the rise even with cars that don’t drive themselves – where hackers can glean all sorts of financial and personal information from reaching into your dashboard remotely.
Kyle Hyatt at Road Show covers results from a study by Upstream.auto, an Israeli firm looking at incidents of automotive hacking.
The report brings a business-type analysis to the phenomenon, citing a 99% increase in cybersecurity automotive hacks in the last year, and 94% growth year over year since 2016.
Anecdotally, the report cites a Toyota data vulnerability that exposed 3.1 million drivers.
One of the industry’s solutions, according to Hyatt, is a ‘bug bounty’ program where white hatters are encouraged to report vulnerabilities.
That may go some distance toward closing the loopholes but until car makers batten down the hatches quite a bit, we’re likely to see a lot more vehicle hacking in the future.
The future of crime is digital – and as long as hackers can exploit insecure dashboard systems, we’re likely to see all sorts of bad actors operating out of public rest areas or anywhere else they can get proximity, or just working through virtual network to target in-dash data sources.
How might this work? For starters, think about whether you would ever enter in financial information through your dashboard, or even verbally confirm something like your Social Security number. Maybe you have a virtual payment system or a cryptocurrency investment that you could manage through your car’s computer. Barring those kinds of vulnerabilities, hackers could even build an elaborate personal profile of you by eavesdropping on your car conversations, or scraping other information from your car’s infotainment system.
All of this is really telling when it comes to the future of cars that look more like computers. Factor this into your investment strategy and outlook in the automotive sector.
