New security means new kinds of theft for cars
If you have to explain how your car was broken into, the answers are fairly standard: It was parked with the doors unlocked; it was in an abandoned area where no eyes or other cars were around; a professional car thief easily unlocked it from the outside, using sophisticated tools.
But today, we can expect to lose a car because someone “hacks” it.
As The Drum notes:
“BMW has patched a jarring flaw allowing hackers to exploit internet of things-enabled doors to gain access to over 2.2m of the firm’s latest cars.
The German car manufacturer has released an update to its ConnectedDrive car connectivity system to protect it from hacking and malware which could have effectively opened car doors to attackers.”
This is part of a general move we as a global society are taking as everything is becoming connected, via the internet; this is known as the “Internet of things”, says CBS News, “where billions of devices – from home appliances to medical equipment to entire urban traffic light grids – are connected online.”
Yet, this makes it ripe for exploitation. If someone can control all those devices willingly, then someone can have that control taken unwillingly and use for ulterior ends.
Indeed, nowhere is this more problematic or obvious than with cars.
CBS News spoke to the “U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the man who heads its Information Innovation Office, Dan Kaufman, about this.
“One of the vulnerabilities Kaufman and DARPA are working to eliminate that affects many is in the automobile. Cars today are loaded with computers networked to each other, and those can be hacked remotely. In a dramatic demonstration, he and his colleagues use a laptop computer to hack into a car being driven by Stahl. Much to her surprise, they were able to take control of many of the car’s functions, including the braking and acceleration.”
You won’t find this technology in second cars or used cars for sale online, of course – indeed, even in new cars, you might struggle to find it. Yet this is the future of motoring security – which means it’s the future of motor theft. Someone with a laptop and know-how can take over your car without leaving their room.
The implications are, of course, more problematic when you realise that we will soon have driverless cars on the road entirely reliant on the inter-connectedness of systems to function properly. If doors can be opened with a laptop because the security system is connected to wider systems, what will happen when entire car is connected?
This is worth being concerned about – yet no one is more concerned than, as we noted, manufacturers.