Dude, Who Hacked My Car?

If a computer can do it, a hacker can — it's that simple.

As cars continue to make the transition from the clunky, reliable, steely manual things of the Mad Men era to the sleeker, flimsier, automated beasts of today and tomorrow, computers are playing a big role, and that means the cars themselves are vulnerable to techy foul play.

Chris Valasek, the director of security intelligence for the security firm IOActive, and Charlie Miller, security engineer for Twitter, found that the on-board computer U.S vehicles have been required to have since 1996 leaves them susceptible to illegal reprogramming by hackers, AFP reports.

Valasek, who was funded by the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, tested it out himself and found that he could hack into an automobile's braking mechanisms, and gain "full control." He and his hacking team were able to play all sorts of sinister man-behind-the-curtain tricks on the targeted vehicle, including honking the horn, and switching on and off the headlights.

If given "a brief moment of physical access," a hacker could "reprogram and untether from the car and the system," Valasek said. This can all be done by overwriting the software code in the vehicles.

This is not the first research done on automobiles to show the potential for hacking into car computer systems (and think of all the research to come when self-driving vehicles become a common reality); a study in 2010 by researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California at San Diego was able to show how an attacker could infiltrate virtually any electronic control unit (ECU) of a car in order to screw up its security programming. 

The latest research comes in tome for next week's Def Con, an annual gathering of hackers and security experts in Las Vegas. It is hoped that the presentation demonstrating the new nefarious findings will be a wakeup call to the auto industry.