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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 30 2019, @06:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-can't-get-there-from-here dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:05PM

    by Rivenaleem (3400) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:05PM (#873541)

    How come this isn't already common? It isn't hard to disable vehicles by dropping things (caltrops) into their path. Why do you need a hacker and interconnected cars to achieve this?

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