Such a scenario was bad enough for JLR as a business; crooks were attempting to ransom highly sensitive commercial material, not just next week’s staff cafeteria menu. However, manufacturers now collect mountains of customer data from GPS movements to credit card details. This once again places you and I in the firing line, meaning car brands need to revisit their days in cyber security school in order to protect us.
Customer information was recently stolen from a third-party that processes it for Renault Group. Aside from the obvious instances of identity theft and of credit card fraud, could a hack like this enable online crooks to track your car’s location and see when it’s not at your home, only to then burglarize your house when you’re not there? While this luckily didn’t happen with Renault, there’s nothing to say such an infiltration wouldn’t be possible.
Many modern cars feature built-in interior cameras – these would be ideal means to spy on your actions and conversations. In fact, the Ministry of Defence only recently warned staff about having sensitive conversations in Chinese-built cars over the fear that Beijing could be using the in-built technology to spy on the UK.
Whatever the threat, car brands won’t want to stop collecting data anytime soon; a study of 25 major manufacturers by the Mozilla Foundation revealed that 84 per cent either share or sell your personal data to third parties, making the practice incredibly lucrative.
With great power comes great responsibility and while protecting your data is certainly in a manufacturer’s best business interests, car firms must also remain accountable and liable for the information they collect and ultimately what happens to it.
The same goes for the potential hacking of vehicles themselves; autonomous driving tech hands a lot of the control over to AI networks and internal systems that are vulnerable to malicious interference. Driverless cars are about safety as much as they are about convenience, and thousands of two-tonne taxis at the mercy of a criminal’s keyboard is a sobering thought indeed.
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