While connected cars with more digital components is inevitable, what this means is that it could open up more cars to hackers who could find a way to take control of your car or access it remotely. Apparently Tesla’s electric vehicles exhibit such vulnerabilities, according to Nitesh Dhanjani, a corporate security consultant and an owner of a Tesla vehicle himself.
He revealed the flaw during a conference in Singapore after claiming to have conducted a study himself. According to his findings, hackers could remotely unlock the car via a command transmitted over the internet. This is done by hacking the password that Tesla owners use to setup their account which can also be used to unlock the car.
In fact Dhanjani stated that the hacking of the password is not dissimilar to how hackers hack passwords on regular computers via malware and so on. “It’s a big issue where a $100,000 car should be relying on a six-character static password.” Thankfully this appears to be the extent of the hack.
The car requires a key fob in order for it to be driven so what this means is that at most, hackers will be able to unlock the car and steal its contents, like GPS systems, laptops, tablets, money, or whatever’s stored in the car. Dhanjani has since passed the information along to Tesla and according to a spokesperson, Patrick Jones, “We protect our products and systems against vulnerabilities with our dedicated team of top-notch information security professionals, and we continue to work with the community of security researchers and actively encourage them to communicate with us through our responsible reporting process.”