A 14-year-old hacker caught the auto industry by surprise

This was only a matter of time....

One Student's Exploits Showed Executives How Vulnerable Their Cars Are

by Pete Bigelow of www.autoblog.com

A 14-year-old boy may have forever changed the way the auto industry views cyber security.

He was part of a group of high-school and college students that joined professional engineers, policy-makers and white-hat security experts for a five-day camp last July that addressed car-hacking threats.

"This kid was 14, and he looked like he was 10," said Dr. Andrew Brown Jr., vice president and chief technologist at Delphi Automotive.

With some help from the assembled experts, he was supposed to attempt a remote infiltration of a car, a process that some of the nation's top security experts say can take weeks or months of intricate planning. The student, though, eschewed any guidance. One night, he went to Radio Shack, spent $15 on parts and stayed up late into the night building his own circuit board.

The next morning, he used his homemade device to hack into the car of a major automaker.Camp leaders and automaker representatives were dumbfounded. "They said, 'There's no way he should be able to do that,'" Brown said Tuesday, recounting the previously undisclosed incident at a seminar on the industry's readiness to handle cyber threats. "It was mind-blowing."

Windshield wipers turned on and off. Doors locked and unlocked. The remote start feature engaged. The student even got the car's lights to flash on and off, set to the beat from songs on his iPhone. Though they wouldn't divulge the student's name or the brand of the affected car, representatives from both Delphi and Battelle, the nonprofit that ran the CyberAuto Challenge event, confirmed the details.

If car makers weren't taking cyber threats seriously before the demonstration, they were afterward.

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