When Michael Hastings was assassinated conspiracy theorists claimed that his brand new Mercedes was probably hacked - this I discounted as not being possible until I saw this article from Forbes today (
check out the video - scary stuff )
Extract from Forbes
"The fact, that a car is not a simple machine of glass and steel but a hackable network of computers, is what Miller and Valasek have spent the last year trying to demonstrate.
Miller, a 40-year-old security engineer at Twitter, and Valasek, the 31-year-old director of security intelligence at the Seattle consultancy IOActive,
received an $80,000-plus grant last fall from the mad-scientist research arm of the Pentagon known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency "
Full link to article video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqe6S6m73Zw
"As I drove their vehicles for more than an hour, Miller and Valasek showed that they’ve reverse-engineered enough of the software of the Escape and the Toyota Prius (both the 2010 model) to demonstrate a range of nasty surprises:
everything from annoyances like uncontrollably blasting the horn to serious hazards like slamming on the Prius’ brakes at high speeds. They sent commands from their laptops that killed power steering, spoofed the GPS and made pathological liars out of speedometers and odometers. Finally they directed me out to a country road, where Valasek showed that he could violently jerk the Prius’ steering at any speed, threatening to send us into a cornfield or a head-on collision. “Imagine you’re driving down a highway at 80 ,” Valasek says. “You’re going into the car next to you or into oncoming traffic. That’s going to be bad times.”
Gaining wireless access to a car’s network is old news. A team of researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, experimenting on a sedan from an unnamed company in 2010, found that they could wirelesly penetrate the same critical systems Miller and Valasek targeted using the car’s OnStar-like cellular connection.
A car like the 2014 Mercedes Benz S-Class, which can negotiate stop-and-go traffic or follow a leader without input, may offer a hacker even more points of attack, says Gartner Group analyst Thilo Koslowski. “The less the driver is involved, the more potential for failure when bad people are tampering with it,” he says.
Michael Hastings was driving a brand new Mercedes C250 Coupe
Richard Clarke, a former State Department official and adviser to several United States presidents, said the crash looked to be consistent with what he termed a “car cyberattack,” one orchestrated by a computer to seize control of the car.
Full Link to article :
http://www.inquisitr.com/856084/michael ... sts-death/
“What has been revealed as a result of some research at universities is
that it’s relatively easy to hack your way into the control system of a car, and to do such things as cause acceleration when the driver doesn’t want acceleration, to throw on the brakes when the driver doesn’t want the brakes on, to launch an air bag,” Clarke told The Huffington Post. “You can do some really highly destructive things now, through hacking a car, and it’s not that hard.”
Here is the full link to the article to be published by the magazine "Forbes" on August 13 , 2013
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenbe ... eel-video/
Guardian : Probably best to drive an old car with limited electronics - less to go wrong and safer all round