Sticking accelerator pedals were just the beginning. Soon you might lose control of your car not because of a technical failure, but because someone hacked into it from afar. Tomorrow at a security conference in California, Stefan Savage and his team will present their research showing how they used the computer systems that oversee different systems in a car to break in and take control—braking and accelerating against the driver's will.
The researchers concentrated their attacks on the electronic control units (ECUs) scattered throughout modern vehicles which oversee the workings of many car components. It is thought that modern vehicles have about 100 megabytes of binary code spread across up to 70 ECUs [BBC News].
