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Monday, September 12, 2011

Your car, the next target for malware?

Last week McAfee released a new report talking about cars, and specifically car electronics as the likely next target for hackers who spread malware. While it still seems far-fetched today, as cars become more sophisticated, they are beginning to have complete computer systems, and while much of that is hidden from the driver, it will become more and more visible and interactive with the driver. Even my car today, has voice recognition, and interfaces with my cell phone to get me directions, news, weather stock quotes, etc, all given back to me through bluetooth, transferred directly through the radio's speaker system. So an attack if it's targeted like an APT, is certainly a possibility in the near future on car electronics.

The question though is what's in it for the hacker? As most know today, hackers today are driven by money, and creating malware is generally tied to making money in some manner. But where's the money in hacking a car? You could certainly hack a car and cause an accident, but until money or identity can be remotely retrieved from a person's vehicle, attacks on individual cars, probably remains unlikely, other than just as a curiosity.

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