How Hackable Are New Cars?

autos.aol.com When buying a car, consumers look for crash ratings and the amount of airbags, but they're missing information about one critical key safety feature; the security of the car's computer network. Security researchers Dr. Charlie Miller, a security engineer at Twitter, and Chris Valasek, Directory of Security Intelligence at IOActive, want to change that. In a talk at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this week the pair presented a 92-page paper entitled 'A Survey of Remote Automotive Attack Surfaces'. They dug through the schematics of 24 different newer vehicles and found the more complex and integrated a car's network, the more hackable it became. "The most hackable cars had the most [computerized] features and were all on the same network and could all talk to each other," Miller told Dark Readings. "The least hackable ones had [fewer] features, and [the features] were segmented, so the radio couldn't talk to the brakes." to read more: autos.aol.com