Connected car hack research extends reach
I recently had an opportunity to speak with Martin Hunt, BT Global Services‘ automotive industry practice lead, at the CyberSecure Car 15 conference in Dresden, Germany. While ethical hacking is not normally a topic one associates with BT Global Services, the company has actually been working in the space for quite a while, with over 20 years of combined experience on this topic.
BT is able to leverage its industry knowledge across multiple vertical markets into the automotive space through lessons it learned in other transportation markets. The challenges with cars also translate to trucks, ships, trains, planes, etc. As the connected car becomes more commonplace, the opportunities to hack also increase.
Hacking opportunities present themselves in many different shapes and sizes. It’s impossible to have missed the latest news related to Volkswagen. But was it a hack? Not in the sense of traditional malicious hacking, but across the industry this “mode” of impacting a company’s brand, reliability and credibility could translate into hacks of the future. If you consider this occurrence in terms of a hack – it was basically enabled through the insertion of code into an engine control unit within these vehicles. Although the malicious intent was deception and ultimately financial in this case, what if it had been related to an ECU that controlled the vehicle’s safety? A pretty scary thought.
In the video below, Martin Hunt discusses these topics and more along with BT’s view on where the industry is going related to the interrelationship of security and safety.
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Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
