Computer Viruses... Now Affecting Cars

I bet when all of our grandparents were sitting around and thinking of wild things that would happen in the future there was one thing that wasn't on the list... Computers in your car. The only thing that seems more far fetched than the idea of a computer in a car is that computer getting infected with a virus... But it's happened.

Cars are almost more computer than machine these days, so it's not a leap to think that all those nasty viruses you get on your laptop, phone, or tablet can be translated to infect a car, and one angry mechanic did just that.

This guy did everything from making your car alarm go off without stopping to preventing it from starting at all. HowStuffWorks (the award-winning source of credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works) wrote the following:

More than 100 Texas drivers could have been excused for thinking that they had really horrendous luck or -- at least for the more superstitious among them -- that their vehicles were possessed by an evil spirit. That's because in 2010, more than 100 customers of a dealership called Texas Auto Center found their efforts to start their cars fruitless, and even worse, their car alarms blared ceaselessly, stopped only when the batteries were removed from the vehicles [source: Shaer].

What seemed to some to be a rash of coincidence and mechanical failure turned out to be the work of a disgruntled employee-turned-hacker. Omar Ramos-Lopez, who had been laid off by the Texas Auto Center, decided to exact some revenge on his former Austin, Texas employer by hacking into the company's Web-based vehicle immobilization system, typically used to disable the cars of folks who had stopped making mandatory payments [source: Shaer]. Besides creating plenty of mayhem and generating a flood of angry customer complaints, Ramos-Lopez, who was eventually arrested, highlighted some of the vulnerabilities of our increasingly computer-dependent vehicles from a skilled and motivated hacker.

Read More: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-computer-virus.htm

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