Why Car Companies Are Hiring Computer Security Experts

It all began 7 years ago when Iranian best nuclear scientists were assassinated in a range of similar attacks. The assailants would ride by on motor bikes pulling up to the scientists’ cars and attaching magnetic bombs then detonating them from a safe and unnoticeable distance. Security experts have thus warned that in another 5-7 years the assassins will not require to use motorcycles and magnetic bombs but a laptop to do their dirty work.

The laptop can send a code to the driverless vehicles thus driving them off to a cliff or off a bridge. They can even ram your car to an upcoming truck in the middle of a fast moving traffic. Automotive companies can call them self-driving vehicles but cyber criminals see them as machines that can travel with a speed of up to 100 miles/hr. These are therefore no longer cars but may as well be termed as killing machines.

These fears were proven right when two professional hackers (researchers) who are tasked to look for any computer vulnerabilities and fix them rather than committing crime were successfully able to hack a Jeep Cherokee using their computer from miles away. These hackers who are now security researchers for Uber and Didi a competitor of Uber’s in China discovered that the weakness was from an electric route in the Jeep’s entertainment system. They took control of the brakes, the steering wheel to even the car’s transmission that they were able to paralyze the car in the middle of a highway.

This shows that it could get really dangerous incase such a hack could been done by someone with the wrong intentions (cyber criminals). Car hacks usually make very good headlines but wait until your car gets hacked. Things could get real messy which you do not want happening while you’re in a fast moving traffic.

Most of the CEOs in major car companies have thus branded cyber security as the top most priority in their car assembling process. The skills of the so called professional hackers have of late become a huge demand with automotive companies fighting to get the best and others preventing theirs from getting poached.

A perfect example of this is when Tesla Company poached the witty Aaron Sigel (Apple’s main security manager) to work on their operating system. Didi also called in by Mr. Miller from the Uber Company.

This shows that most automotive companies are actually hiring computer security experts for better customer loyalty and service. This shows that some few years to come any automotive company without a computer security team will be at great risk of closure due to hacks and loss of customers.

(1 raters, 5 scores, average: 5.00 out of 5)