“Our focus, and that of the entire auto industry, is to prevent hacking from a remote wireless device outside of the vehicle,” he writes in an e-mail, adding that Toyota engineers test its vehicles against wireless attacks. “We believe our systems are robust and secure.”
A team of researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, experimenting on a sedan from an unnamed company in 2010, found that they could wirelessly penetrate the same critical systems Miller and Valasek targeted using the car’s OnStar-like cellular connection, Bluetooth bugs, a rogue Android app that synched with the car’s network from the driver’s smartphone or even a malicious audio file on a CD in the car’s stereo system. “Academics have shown you can get remote code execution,” says Valasek, using hacker jargon for the ability to start running commands on a system. “We showed you can do a lot of crazy things once you’re inside.”
Yes, but that article, if you read the whole thing, showed that none of those hacks would work on a “virgin” vehicle, that the hackers didn’t gain access to somehow beforehand. That access may have been by getting them to play an audio cd in the vehicle, or through a compromised diagnostic computer at the mechanics, but there had to be some setup work done in order for any of the hacks to work. They cannot just pick a random car on the street and hack into it wirelessly.