Hackers Show They Can Take Control of Moving Jeep Cherokee

And autonomous cars are supposed to reduce the accidents. Not after the hackers get a hold of them.

The internet of everything is going through growing pains.

What amazes me is that network security is an already known and convoluted problem. Why are the marketeers trying to put everything on the net? Do they want it to be hacked or do they not care?

Nothing like a Cherokee on drugs hijacked by cloud-addicts running Cherokindows XP SP3. S.M.

With the "Internet of Things" we keep getting farther out on the limb until it breaks off! I want a vehicle that's reliable and absolutely under my control.

The Internet of Things is rapidly turning into the Internet of Thugs.

Even when the hackers are caught the penalties are minimum and do little to discourage the activity.

Often the hackers end up in the employment of an IT vendor or a company IT group or the US government instead of where they belong in a jail cell.

The company I work for now had a young hacker get into their IT system including payroll where he raised havoc.

Instead of prosecuting him they hired him into the IT group and he is now an IT manager.

In this company's particular case it seems to be a success as far as this individual is concerned however I am confident the punishment did absolutely nothing to discourage other hackers.

The damage is extremely costly and can be deadly if the hacker(s) get into the Process Controls so I am in favor of instituting the maximum penalty.

No cell phone, nor internet, no video games for at least one year should do it. Yes?

One year is much too soft. They deserve to spend equal time for minimum wage until they pay for the damage they did. These hackers know that if they are smart enough that they will skate on the criminal charges and then get rewarded with an incredible disgustingly super high salary and position in an IT job.

Yep. Kinda like the many other facets of the liberal part of society's ideas on accountability for criminals.

So, hackers, the guys that among other things, search, find and exploit planted (almost all cases) backdoors and loopholes in our computer systems are the only bad guys, and those that plant those traps for their own dirty reasons are the good guys? Way too simplistic if you ask me. Anyway, did it ever occur to you that the main reason the "good" guys hire their "enemies" is because of their ability to plant harder to find "vulnerabilities"? Or do you even think that we would ever be informed on the existence of those vulnerabilities without the hackers? Things are not always black or white my friend. Whatever. S.M.

I hope that I am preaching to the choir here but I have a convoluted comment that might get lost in my stupor. So please bear with me. I will focus more on who I believe owns most of the blame here at the end than in the beginning.

I do not attribute one iota of blame to the reporters bringing to the public attention at all this hacking vulnerability. I do question the need to so publicly demonstrate this hacking vulnerability while recognizing a public demonstration may be the only way to force a proper response from those with the authority to deal with this problem, the makers of this vehicle.

At the same time, why has the makers of these vehicles opened this version of Pandora's box? [WIFI access to the back seat an intended comment.] Because the purchasers of these vehicles value and understand much more easily the conveniences instead of the consequences of our choices. Thus all of the advertising and sales hype focuses on convenience over security.

As The Bard claimed Cassius told Brutus more than a millennia and a half after the fateful incident ; "The fault, dear Brutus is not in the stars/ But in ourselves' that we are underlings..."

As the mythical personification of the Engineer, Dilbert, would likely claim... For far too long marketing has triumphed over engineering in the realm of capitalism. For better or worse, we are starting to reap these repercussions of these capitalism choices.

Locard's electronic exchange principle?

It occurs to me that if these vehicles had been totally automated we would be having a much more serious discussion.

This is further proof that we are a long way from being able to ensure personal safety in any automobile with any computer based automated critical controls.

Imagine if (when) hackers manage to get control of a vehicle that has automated parking capability when it is traveling on a 75MPH freeway during rush hour.

The flip side is that vehicles with the security required to stop or at least slow down the hacking attempts will not allow aftermarket repairs to their system which will become quite expensive. Why you ask? Because they can.

It's not like this is the first time it's been done, here's an article from 2010 on the same topic. Here's a good introduction that illustrates how many networks are in newer cars, and let's not forget V2V (Vehicle to Vehicle) comms that will provide information to/from other cars on the road with you. Just think, instead of drive-by shootings we'll be hearing about drive-by virus infections...

With the development of autonomous cars on the horizon, combined with this development, any "wanna-be" hacker-terrorist could deliver an explosive, or biological load anywhere and detonate it. Not good....Just the old cop thinking coming out in me.