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In the year 2026, at rush hour, your self-driving car abruptly shuts down right where it blocks traffic. You climb out to see gridlock down every street in view, then a news alert on your watch tells you that hackers have paralysed all Manhattan traffic by randomly stranding internet-connected cars.
Flashback to July 2019, the dawn of autonomous vehicles and other connected cars, and physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Multiscale Systems, Inc. have applied physics in a new study to simulate what it would take for future hackers to wreak exactly this widespread havoc by randomly stranding these cars. The researchers want to expand the current discussion on automotive cyber-security, which mainly focuses on hacks that could crash one car or run over one pedestrian, to include potential mass mayhem.
They warn that even with increasingly tighter cyber defences, the amount of data breached has soared in the past four years, but objects becoming hackable can convert the rising cyber threat into a potential physical menace.
Hackers could use connected cars to gridlock whole cities
[Source]: Georgia Tech
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 30 2019, @09:27PM (3 children)
Back in the mid 1970s when solid state electronic ignition transitioned (from points and condenser) some cars would stall on hwy 5 in SoCal under the high voltage lines at San Onofre nuclear power plant.
Hackers... If you type a random string of letters (or manipulate them) in the URL bar and gain access to something you're not suppose to, is it hacking or chance?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 30 2019, @10:00PM (2 children)
Alas no court sees things this way, it's almost as if courts aren't staffed by people who've spent 3 decades in the field of IT.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 30 2019, @11:18PM (1 child)
So the same logic applies to a combination lock on a safe full of gold?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:14AM
If you put the voice activated safe door on the border of your property facing the street, and there is a mechanism inside the safe to throw a gold bar into the street when you call out a specific number, then yes, standing on the street calling out numbers is legal.
You might be able to argue that taking the gold bar was theft, but the court is still going to laugh at you.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.