Conspiracy theory no more; vehicles have come to depend more and more on computers that can be easily hacked.
Ever wanted to know how to hack a car? Well, this article teaches you how! You see, as cars begin to rely on an internet connection, hackers are able to access everything from the camshaft to power seats. When cars allow automatic stearing and parking though, that’s when things get scary.
Wired filmed one of their own journalists drive a completely unmodified Jeep; it is hacked easily by the hackers who are MILES AWAY. Watch as every facet of the vehicle slowly gets commandeered by the hackers.
Andy Greenberg is the journalist at Wired who had volunteered to be the test subject for the hack. He wrote the following testimony:
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.
Thankfully, the hackers were Charlie Miller and Chris Valask, who had no intention of harming their test subject. Not all journalists were quite so lucky.
“Of course we didn’t actually attack any vehicles except our own, cause we’re good guys”.
He estimates that there are about 471,000 vulnerable vehicles. Easy prey for malicious hackers, and government agents of any country that sees the opportunity for snuffing out uncooperative citizens without anyone the wiser.
For the convenience of having their car park itself and an internet connection, drivers are exposing themselves to unneccessary risk. Michael Hastings is one case which the mainstream
media was all too quick to call conspiracy theory, despite the recent evidence proving that the newest cars are the most vulnerable to such hacking.
Anyone who was following the story would know that the controversial journalist had received multiple death threats for his story that brought low General Stanley McChrystal for his role in perpetrating JSOC, a covert elite unit that was responsible for killing scores of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere that have gone unexamined and unpunished.
According to Hastings, an unnamed aid of the general had said that “We’ll hunt you down and kill you if we don’t like what you write.”
L.A. Weekly interviewed Hastings’s neighbor, Jordanna Thigpen, who said Hastings was convinced that he was a target of surveillance after reading about the Department of Justice’s seizure of AP phone records.“He was scared, and he wanted to leave town,” Thigpen said. The story that Hastings was working on at the time of his death centered around CIA Director John Brennan, the chief architect of President Obama’s foreign drone program. It related specifically to Brennan’s role as the administration’s point man tracking investigative journalists and their sources in Washington. This email from Stratfor, a CIA-connected private security firm whose emails were hacked and released to the public by Wikileaks in February of last year, reveals that Brennan was indeed behind the “witch hunts of investigative journalists.” The night of his death, Hastings had contacted Wikileaks attorney Jennifer Robinson and sent an email to his colleagues at the news site BuzzFeed, saying he was working on a big story and was “going off the rada[r],” citing fears over federal authorities interviewing his friends. Hastings blind-copied his friend, the Staff Sgt. Joe Biggs, whom Hastings had known from his time embedded in Afghanistan.
According to L.A. Weekly, just hours before the deadly crash Hastings had asked to borrow his neighbor’s Volvo because he suspected his own car’s computer system had been hacked.
The Los Angeles Police Department said repeatedly it suspects no foul play. Questioned after Hastings’s death, the FBI confirmed that the journalist was not under any investigation.
But those statements were directly contradicted in September when redacted FBI documents surfaced following a Freedom of Information Act request by the news network Al Jazeera, which showed that Hastings was in fact under investigation for a story in which he had interviewed a U.S. soldier who had been captured in Afghanistan.
You see, that’s why I use public transport. It’s, by definition, public.
Also, I’m a horrendous driver.
Also, I need any excuse I can get to prevent myself from being turned into my family’s private chauffeur.
And it’s cheap.
sources: Fossbytes
Why don’t they try this on Chevrolets before that company kills more people from bad parts or bad ideas?