April 24, 2015: Civilian and military vehicle manufacturers are become increasingly aware that the many (dozens) of small computers in their vehicles and increasingly common wireless communications capability makes these vehicles vulnerable to hacking. There have been a growing number of vehicle hacking incidents and while manufacturers of commercial vehicles worry about criminal hacking and general liability for accidents related to hacking, military users are concerned about such hacking by opponents in a combat zone rendering their combat vehicles useless.
Most people are unaware of how much computers have become a key part of their vehicles. The people who maintain vehicles know all about it, because those who have been in the business since the 1990s can remember a time when you didn’t have to plug a PC into a vehicles network to find out what was wrong and how to fix it. Over the last decade it has reached the point where you don’t just start your car but boot it, like a computer. Even when the vehicle engine is turned off, there’s a lot more battery drain than in the pre-computer days because many systems remain on nearly all the time so users don’t have to go through the kind of boot process PC users are accustomed to.
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