On March 17, 2016, the FBI and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) together issued a joint bulletin and public service announcement ominously titled “Motor Vehicles Increasingly Vulnerable to Remote Exploits.” The bulletin starts by observing that “remote exploits,” more commonly known as hacking, have risen in conjunction with the increasing placement in vehicles of interconnected technologies that rely on wireless communications. Perhaps more alarmingly given the ubiquity of the cloud, data stored within such systems are equally prone to theft. While these wireless-enabled technologies provide heightened safety features, convenience and greater fuel efficiency, attackers have devised a variety of ways to access the data generated through the use of both manufacturer-provided and aftermarket devices. Wireless communications capabilities are enabled in these “connected” cars for functions such as keyless entry, navigation, media playing, diagnostics, and tire pressure monitoring, just to name a few.
The harms delineated in the Bulletin, and echoed elsewhere, are by no means speculative or far-fetched. In a notable 2015 study, researchers were able to hack into vehicles, and at low speeds, shutdown the engine, disable the brakes and disengage the steering column. They also remotely manipulated the door locks, turn signal, GPS and radio at any speed. In another highly-publicized 2015 article in Wired, a Jeep Cherokee was hacked into while the author was in the car and driving through downtown St. Louis. In this instance, the hackers, by using a hacking technique called “zero-day exploit,” remotely blasted the air conditioning at the maximum setting, blared the radio at an earsplitting volume, and prevented the accelerator from functioning. This led the author to describe himself as a “digital crash test dummy.” Prior to this demonstration, the only documented case of remote hacking occurred in 2010 and it was at the hands of a disgruntled dealer employee.
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