Here’s What Happens When Hackers Shut Down a Jeep’s Engine Going 70mph on a Highway

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Some of you have probably already read Wired’s shocking article published yesterday titled: Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway—With Me in It. If not, I strongly suggest getting caught up.

If two guys working out of a basement estimate they can hack 471,000 vehicles made by Chysler from their couch, just imagine what a more sophisticated and well funded team can do.

Here are some excerpts from Wired:

I WAS DRIVING 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold. 

Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched to the local hip hop station and began blaring Skee-lo at full volume. I spun the control knob left and hit the power button, to no avail. Then the windshield wipers turned on, and wiper fluid blurred the glass.

As I tried to cope with all this, a picture of the two hackers performing these stunts appeared on the car’s digital display: Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, wearing their trademark track suits. A nice touch, I thought.

The Jeep’s strange behavior wasn’t entirely unexpected. I’d come to St. Louis to be Miller and Valasek’s digital crash-test dummy, a willing subject on whom they could test the car-hacking research they’d been doing over the past year. The result of their work was a hacking technique—what the security industry calls a zero-day exploit—that can target Jeep Cherokees and give the attacker wireless control, via the Internet, to any of thousands of vehicles. Their code is an automaker’s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.

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