Imagine that you’re cruising along at 112 kilometers per hour, confident in the stability and security of your brand new Jeep Cherokee. Suddenly, you begin to notice that the air conditioning has come on by itself. Next of all the music is increasing in volume and the windscreen wipers have taken on a life of their own. Finally, the engine cuts out.
This is what happened to Andy Greenberg, a journalist for Wired. Luckily for him though, two experts in computer security, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, had already warned him that this could happen.
From a distance of 15 kilometers, the two investigators were able to control the vehicle by taking advantage of a vulnerability in the navigation and entertainment system, Uconnect. Chrysler chose to cover over the problem with a blocker that the client had to download, but eventually they admitted that they had to recall up to 1.4 million vehicles.
