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tldr: Cyber attack is 1000x easier than defense. There are enough Tesla cars on the road today that can be hacked into and turned into WMDs. Lots of ideas added
by anonu 9y ago
tldr: Cyber attack is 1000x easier than defense. There are enough Tesla cars on the road today that can be hacked into and turned into WMDs. Lots of ideas added in on how to bolster defense.
- lucb1e 9y agoWeapons of Mass Destruction, that is^ I knew what you meant only because I had read the article.
- ravitation 9y ago"WMDs" has been a common acronym in the American lexicon since 2003 and the invasion of Iraq. (This is just a cultural aside. I know there is a world outside of the United States.)
- Zigurd 9y agoCar bombs are bad, but they are not "WMDs." Nevermind that it is cheaper to find a suicidal driver, or trick a driver into going on a suicide mission than it is to buy a Tesla and hack it into a car bomb. Many imagined terrorist threats are threats only in a vacuum. A rifle and a tall building resulted in 50+ deaths and 500+ wounded. Any technologically complex attack has to beat those numbers. The only notable attack with an actual WMD was the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. It killed about one fourth the number of people as a man with a rifle in Las Vegas. It took a secretive cult organization to implement. That's why nobody uses WMDs for terror attacks. Trucks and rifles do enough damage without even having to acquire bomb-making skills. Autonomous vehicles that are programmed to avoid hitting pedestrians are likely to make it harder to use vehicles as a weapon, not more deadly.
- wehadfun 9y agobuy a Tesla and hack it into a car bomb You did not read the article
- aidenn0 9y agoFast forward 10 years; the features in the Model S have trickled down to whatever car is 2027's Toyota Camry. You figure out how to hack it over the internet and load a program that uses its cameras to identify a pedestrian and drive straight towards it at full speed. You turn on this program at some busy time of day. There are times of days in which there are tens of thousands of late model Camry's on the road in the US, and this is the very first example I could think of when considering the problem raised in the article.
- oehpr 9y agoWell, it's not car bombs we're talking about here. Assume you have a fleet of self driving cars on the road deployed throughout the nation. A vulnerability is discovered that allows an attacker total control. They deploy that vulnerability, and cause every single car in the fleet to accelerate and aim for pedestrians. So the next bit we have to ask is: How many self driving cars would be on the road at the time this attack gets deployed. Multiply this with: How likely the driver/occupant will die in this event, how likely is this event going to kill or harm pedestrians, and how much structural damage would be done? Play with those figures for a bit. Personally, what I'd consider reasonable guesses at these numbers results in some very large bodycounts.
- bzbarsky 9y agoThe article is not talking about car bombs. It's talking about attacks like "make every car of model X that's currently on the road accelerate to 120mph and then ram the nearest wall". This would kill a number of people on the order of magnitude of the number of cars of model X in existence (assume each one only kills one person, the driver), but even that can easily be on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions. For example, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Corolla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Corolla there were 40 million Corolla's sold over the span of 47 years, which means there are certainly model years out there with close to a million vehicles sold.
- Zigurd 9y agoMore than 250 million Windows PCs are sold every year and the installed base is over 1.5 billion. The largest botnets number in low single digit millions, or less than 0.5%.
- bzbarsky 9y agoThis is an interesting data point, and I agree that it's hard to explain. Why doesn't a newly-discovered 0-day in Windows lead to pretty much every internet-connected Windows PC being infected? (That said, there are issues around actually reaching these machines, because a lot of them don't have routable IPs and may not load your attack web page. Similar issues may arise for cars, which sure would be nice as a mitigation.) Even so, 0.5% of 1 million is about 5000 people. Not quite WMD territory, but also way out of typical "car bomb" territory... Maybe the mitigating factors would mean the actual fraction would be even less. But it would be nice if we didn't have to hope so.