Remote Car Hacking Just Got Real

[G.Irish]

It would be a stupidly large hole but the auto industry has rolled cars off the lines with stupidly bad mechanical defects before. This is an industry that in the past has gone forward with potentially lethal defects because they thought the cost of lawsuits would be less than the cost of a recall. In many of these cases the severity of the issue was lost on the powers that be, who went on the ignore defects that ended up costing the company dearly.

Now move on to something like cyber security where the people implementing these systems may not have taken the issue as seriously as they need to, and may not have even imagined that vulnerabilties would be exploited in this manner. That risk wouldn't even be properly recognized by decision makers.

We're moving into an era where the cost of information security is going to be a LOT higher and a lot of big, slow-moving organizations are gonna be caught with their pants down, with dire consequences in some cases. Just recently OPM got hacked and over 20 million security clearance applications were stolen. That information is just about as sensitive as they come and *boom*, gone. Or how about the United Airlines computer "incident" that grounded their whole fleet? One would think these organizations would be smarter and more proactive about computer vulnerabilities but with these big bureaucracies it's so easy for security to be pushed down the priority list.