Hackers Could Potentially Disable Your Car's Brakes, Engines, And Pretty Much Everything Else

While everybody is quite stressed over the issue of road safety nowadays, a team of researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California San Diego has found something to further add to your stress levels. They found that with physical access to your car’s ECU, a hacker could potentially control a slew of automotive functions in your car, and even make it ignore your input – such as braking. The fact that they managed to do all sorts of circus tricks such as disable the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine and some other fancy tricks, might make you reluctant to get into your car in the future. They did this by hooking up a computer to the car’s ODB-II port and accessing that computer wirelessly. So with that in place, they were able to drive along with this car in a separate vehicle and wirelessly disable the brakes, something that would probably have some unpleasant results. They concluded that in-car systems very have few, if any safeguards in place to prevent the dangers that might crop up due to physical access. While the manufacturer or the car wasn’t mentioned, in theory this could probably happen to any vehicle. So if you see some weird guy hanging around your car with a laptop, maybe you should pay special attention to him.

Filed in Transportation. Read more about car and hackers.

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