Danger: Hackers Can Disable Brakes On New Cars

It seems that the main stream media is just now catching up to what we here at XSolutions have been warning our readers about for at least a year. It’s good to see that they’re finally coming on board.

Yesterday morning I saw a segment on the news about how “ethical hackers” were able to break into the Wi-Fi of a new automobile and control ALL of the systems in the car including disabling the brakes.

Click here to see this important news segment.

If you read over some of our past blog posts, you’ll see articles on the dangers of poor to non-existent security on Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. IoT is the movement toward putting every device imaginable on the internet.

As we speak, devices ranging from smart meters in homes to cars to aircraft are being brought online. On one hand, this can be seen as a wonderful thing—on the other hand, it poses a nightmare for the security industry and a big danger to the public.

For over a year, we have been calling for tighter security on internet-enabled devices. Many companies are slapping together devices to make a killing in the market and not securing their products against hackers. They are putting profits before people.

It just doesn’t make sense to create devices that can easily be hacked by the criminal element and used to commit crimes that can (and in some cases, do) result in physical harm, not to mention the financial losses suffered by victims.

Here’s an axiom that you should be well aware of: If it is online, it can be hacked. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not being truthful. Period!

This recent story only proves our point even more. Could you imagine traveling with your family in your car coming upon a dangerous curve and when you try to slow down your brakes don’t respond because someone with a grudge against you remotely disabled your brakes? Science fiction? No, this news segment just proved that this is very real.

Is our Government going to wait until the death toll is high enough to start instituting rigorous security standards for the manufacture of internet-enabled devices? Our politicians need to start drafting laws now to protect the public.

 

XSolutions is a Managed Services Provider (MSP) and provides 24/7/365 remote monitoring, scheduled workstation and server maintenance, Help Desk Services, Cloud & Hosted Services, Backup/Disaster Recovery, and Software Development. Call us at (845) 362-9675 and see how we can help your company.