Hackers wirelessly cut a Corvette's brakes with a simple plug and a text message - Digital Trends
Wired reports that researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) were recently able to access vital systems on a 2013 Chevrolet Corvette wirelessly, and they did so via a diagnostic port that’s in every new car on the road. Every car sold in the U. S. after 1996 (and in Europe after 2001) employs something called an On Board Diagnostics Generation II (OBDII) port, which is generally located under the dashboard near the driver’s side door. If you’ve ever had a check engine light come on and brought your car to a shop, the first thing a technician usually does is plug a scanning device into the OBDII port to diagnose the problem. Wireless versions of those scanning tools — called OBDII dongles— are widely available, and they often use Bluetooth connections to transmit vehicle data to smartphones. This doorway to the vehicle’s nervous system was the exact weakness the UCSD researchers needed to hack the ‘Vette’s computer, because after they tinkered with a dongle manufactured by French firm Mobile Devices, they discovered several security... Related: Smart cars are hackable cars. “We acquired some of these things, reverse-engineered them, and along the way found that they had a whole bunch of security deficiencies,” said Stefan Savage, UCSD professor and leader of the Corvette experiment. Source: www.digitaltrends.com
