Who’s Hacking Into Your Vehicle?
Massive Vehicle Recall Follows
Exposure of Hacker Threat
by Kevin Samson
From top to bottom, it appears that our modern Internet-driven world filled with interconnected smart gadgets and modern computing applications is making us vulnerable to potentially life-changing hacks.
It previously has been proven that boats, planes, GPS-driven munitions, unmanned vehicles and even smart homes all can be taken over via remote control.
But nothing has received the level of attention as the common modern vehicle.
Most of us remember the “conspiracy theories” that took place after the death of journalist Michael Hastings when his vehicle showed serious anomalies as it finally slammed into a tree at 140 miles per hour. Now, in an unprecedented move, Fiat-Chrysler is voluntarily recalling 1.4 million vehicles after news broke from Wired Magazine that a Jeep Cherokee had been successfully demonstrated to be remotely hacked via the Internet.
The research covered what is called a “zero-day exploit” hack, which enabled a test vehicle to be fully hijacked simply from obtaining knowledge of the vehicle’s IP address. Wired writer, Andy Greenberg, described what happened next:
As the two hackers remotely toyed with the air-conditioning, radio, and windshield wipers, I mentally congratulated myself on my courage under pressure. That’s when they cut the transmission.
Immediately my accelerator stopped working. As I frantically pressed the pedal and watched the RPMs climb, the Jeep lost half its speed, then slowed to a crawl. This occurred just as I reached a long overpass, with no shoulder to offer an escape. The experiment had ceased to be fun. (Source)
Not fun at all.
The article went on to speculate that perhaps as many as 471,000 vehicles might be similarly exposed. However, 1.4 million is an astonishing number – and of course comes from just one automaker.
In a press release, Fiat-Chrysler admits that “vehicles equipped with 8.4-inch touchscreens among the following populations” should be brought in for a security upgrade:
- 2013-2015 MY Dodge Viper specialty vehicles
- 2013-2015 Ram 1500, 2500 and 3500 pickups
- 2013-2015 Ram 3500, 4500, 5500 Chassis Cabs
- 2014-2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee and Cherokee SUVs
- 2014-2015 Dodge Durango SUVs
- 2015 MY Chrysler 200, Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger sedans
- 2015 Dodge Challenger sports coupes
…customers may visit http://www.driveuconnect.com/software-update/ to input their Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs) and determine if their vehicles are included in the recall.
Read full press release HERE
While it is commendable for such quick action to be taken, it remains to be seen how other automakers will respond, and whether or not long-term confidence will be shaken in the marriage between high-tech computing and vehicles.
Also see what DARPA
says about hacking possibilities:
Hackers Expose New Method for Disabling Vehicles
Last month, a massive vehicle recall from automaker Fiat-Chrysler shocked many who were still unaware at the ease of hacking modern-day vehicles. The research covered what is called a “zero-day exploit” hack, which enabled a test vehicle to be fully hijacked simply from obtaining knowledge of the vehicle’s IP address.
The main culprit that was addressed by Fiat-Chrysler, which led to the voluntary recall of 1.4 million vehicles, was any car that came equipped with 8.4-inch touchscreens as part of the vehicle’s audio/video system.
Wired writer Andy Greenberg is back today with more information from security researchers who were able to show an even easier method to cause a potentially fatal crash in their Corvette test vehicle.
It appears that today’s interconnected smart gadgets and modern computing applications are making cars one of the more vulnerable everyday items open to life-changing hacks. Like cutting the brakes….
As you’ll see in this video, it only takes a smartphone for an outside operator to take full remote control.
At the Usenix security conference today, a group of researchers from the University of California at San Diego plan to reveal a technique they could have used to wirelessly hack into any of thousands of vehicles through a tiny commercial device: A 2-inch-square gadget that’s designed to be plugged into cars’ and trucks’ dashboards and used by insurance firms and trucking fleets to monitor vehicles’ location, speed and efficiency. By sending carefully crafted SMS messages to one of those cheap dongles connected to the dashboard of a Corvette, the researchers were able to transmit commands to the car’s CAN bus—the internal network that controls its physical driving components—turning on the Corvette’s windshield wipers and even enabling or disabling its brakes.[…]
Similar to the response by Chrysler-Fiat, the researchers said that once alerted to the problem, the company quickly offered a security patch. However, according to the statements above, Metromile clearly isn’t the only distributor. They also used the same deflection as Chrysler-Fiat by saying that no one had reported the issue out in the field. But why wouldn’t these companies be properly testing in advance for these vulnerabilities? This is where the problem still remains according to researchers:
…the larger problem of wirelessly hackable dongles plugged into cars’ networks is far from solved. They say they also notified Mobile Devices of its hardware’s insecurity, and were told that the latest versions of the company’s dongles weren’t vulnerable to their attack. But the researchers nonetheless found in scans of the Internet using the search tool Shodan that in addition to the Metromile device, thousands of still-hackable Mobile Devices dongles were visible, mostly in Spain—possibly those used by the Spanish fleet management firm and Mobile Devices customer Coordina. Mobile Devices hasn’t responded to WIRED’s request for comment or for a list of its main customers.[…]
And for those who might feel comfortable that this appears not to be a potentially widespread problem contained with other autos, Wired was quick to point out that it wasn’t a Corvette vulnerability, nor something only used in commercial transit:
…UCSD researchers say they could have hijacked the steering or brakes of just about any modern vehicle with the Mobile Devices dongle plugged into its dash. “It’s not just this car that’s vulnerable,” says UCSD researcher Karl Koscher. He points to the work of researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, who revealed and published the code for a wide array of attacks on a Toyota Prius and Ford Escape in 2013 that required only access to a vehicle’s OBD2 port. “If you put this into a Prius, there are libraries of attacks ready to use online.” (emphasis added)
Hackers are often maligned by media and governments as anarcho-terrorists who aim to bring nothing but disorder and destruction to the world, but fortunately some of them are doing the work that our supposedly trusted corporations should be doing.
This is a story worth paying attention to; it is most assuredly just the tip of the iceberg. It is also a useful topic to offer to those who would knee-jerk shout “conspiracy theory!” when presented with the strange events surrounding the fatal car crash of journalist Michael Hastings, for example.
Perhaps we can now start taking a much closer look at boats, planes, GPS-driven munitions, unmanned vehicles and even smart homes that also can be taken over via remote control.
From Activist Post
@ http://www.activistpost.com/2015/07/massive-vehicle-recall-follows-exposure.html
and http://www.activistpost.com/2015/08/hackers-expose-new-method-for-disabling-vehicles.html
For more information about hacking see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/hacking
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