The car industry owes it to us, and we may end up owing our lives to properly executed cybersecurity. Whether the measures manufacturers are taking will be sufficient remains to be seen, but itвЂ™s clear that cybersecurity that can catch problems before hackers do вЂ“ and prevent them from taking advantage of problems вЂ“ needs to be an absolute priority. The company has developed PASTA (Portable Automotive Security Testbed with Adaptability), a system that allows anyone вЂ“ even car owners вЂ“ to explore connected vehicle ECUs and search for vulnerabilities. Toyota is also using the same tools as hackers. The company says it is using pen-testers and white-hat hackers to search for vulnerabilities in its network. General Motors recently designed a new electronic vehicle platform that takes hacks into account, with cybersecurity вЂњbaked in from the start,вЂќ using, for example, message authentication between vehicle components to ensure that the communication being sent or received is from a legitimate server. So what can we do? Fortunately, the industry is taking the problem seriously. Attacks like these, and certainly others on a smaller scale, are likely to become more common as the decade turns. Just the threat of an attack like that вЂ“ which would likely bring in its wake road rage violence on an unprecedented scale, along with major economic losses вЂ“ would likely prompt city officials to cough up whatever ransom hackers demanded. According to the study, вЂњhackers could not only wreck the occasional vehicle but possibly compound attacks to gridlock whole cities by stalling out a limited percentage of cars.вЂќ You wouldnвЂ™t even need to disable all the cars on the road it would be enough to stall out just 20% of them.

But as always, hackers forge ahead to more spectacular and more damaging attacks.ДЄ scenario foreseen in a Georgia Tech study, where hackers use вЂњgridlockwareвЂќ to halt vehicles until they pay a ransom, is a frighteningly real possibility вЂ“ perhaps even probability. Especially in connected vehicles hackers demonstrated how easy it was to take control of a Jeep Cherokee, and according to many experts, a vehicleвЂ™s CAN bus is eminently hackable.

Vehicles that collect data upload it to servers using the cellular networks available in the area, and those networks have proven vulnerable to intrusion. WeвЂ™ve already seen how hackers can remotely control vehicles theyвЂ™ve hacked into. If that is the direction vehicles are taking, the industry has a responsibility to ensure the people in those vehicles are protected from cyberattacks. Within two decades, more than a quarter of cars on the road will be autonomous, and even the cars that arenвЂ™t self-driving will be connected. The majority of vehicles currently on the road are not yet connected and are certainly not self-driving, but the industry is carrying us toward driverless vehicles. ThatвЂ™s unacceptable unlike infected servers, which are unlikely to do any more than cost companies time and money to fix, vehicles hurtling down the highway at 60 miles an hour can kill. Car companies immediately remediated many hacks discovered in 2019 вЂ“ but as in IT, the remediation came after the fact.

Car hacking tools