Hackers can kill your car brakes and engine

Researchers have found serious vulnerabilities in the computer systems used in the Cars . These vulnerabilities can be exploited to do nasty things things, such as turning off the brakes, changing the speedometer reading, blasting hot air or music on the radio and locking passengers in the car.



In a demonstration experts hacked into a test car's electronic braking system and prevented a test driver from braking a moving car, no matter how hard he pressed on the brakes. In other tests, they were able to kill the engine, falsify the speedometer reading, and automatically lock the car's brakes unevenly .They ran their test by plugging a laptop into the car's diagnostic system and then controlling that computer wirelessly, from a laptop in a vehicle riding next to the car.

To launch this kind of car attack ,an attacker would have to have sophisticated programming abilities and also be able to physically mount some sort of computer on the victim's car to gain access to the embedded systems. To hack the cars, they needed to learn about the Controller Area Network (CAN) system, mandated as a diagnostic tool for all US cars built starting in 2008. They developed a program called CarShark that listens in on CAN traffic as it's sent about the onboard network, and then built ways to add their own network packets.