Automotive Security: Increased Car Electronics Makes Vehicles Vulnerable to Hacking

Automobiles are being redesigned with a focus on electronics and software. And financial analysts are beginning to reclassify automotive companies, if not in the same category as tech companies, in a way that places value on them like tech companies.

A report by McKinsey found that “Today’s cars have up to 150 ECUs and about 100 million lines of code; by 2030, many observers expect them to have roughly 300 million lines of software code. To put this into perspective, a passenger aircraft has an estimated 15 million lines of code and a modern fighter jet about 25 million. A mass-market PC operating system close to 40 million.”

But the increasing reliance on computers, electronics, and software mean that cars are becoming targets for hackers. Cybersecurity for cars hasn’t registered as a concern yet for many consumers — people worry more about car safety and automotive part failure rather than someone cyberhacking their way into the car’s software.

J.P. Singh, marketing manger at Lattice, said that “cars becoming more and more electronified and modernized. They are becoming servers or computers running on wheels, and all of them are susceptible to hacking, which can have some serious consequences in terms of the human life, as well as the cost to the car manufacturers. We need to protect cars to be resilient to these attacks, secure these vehicles so if there’s an attack, they can be brought to a safe stop or a safer state so that human lives can be saved.”

A report by Upstream found that more than 700 separate incidents of automotive hacking have been reported as of July. A hacker could steal personal information or eavesdrop on a phone conversation. More maliciously, hackers could take total control of a vehicle and control its steering, acceleration, and braking. With the rise of ransomware its very plausible to see the scenario of an entire fleet of vehicles immobilized until a payment to hackers is made.

A report from IntSights found that “the biggest challenge for hackers attempting to exploit remote access points is the required proximity to do so. Attacking a moving car can be near impossible if the hacker needs to physically connect to it. However, there are ways to bypass this problem: Attacking a car via a cellular network, breaking into its Wi-Fi access points, or breaking in via the manufacturer’s backend system, to which many modern cars are connected.”

Moshe Shlisel, chief executive of GuardKnox Cyber Technologies, said that “It’s just a matter of time before a major hack happens. The most secure vehicle is a Model T Ford, because it’s not connected to anything.”