Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway—With Me in It

[craigh]

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/

For those that haven't seen this, it's quite interesting, scary and dangerous.

Second, Miller and Valasek have been sharing their research with Chrysler for nearly nine months, enabling the company to quietly release a patch ahead of the Black Hat conference.

Uconnect computers are linked to the Internet by Sprint’s cellular network, and only other Sprint devices can talk to them. So Miller has a cheap Kyocera Android phone connected to his battered MacBook. He’s using the burner phone as a Wi-Fi hot spot, scouring for targets using its thin 3G bandwidth.

A set of GPS coordinates, along with a vehicle identification number, make, model, and IP address, appears on the laptop screen. It’s a Dodge Ram. Miller plugs its GPS coordinates into Google Maps to reveal that it’s cruising down a highway in Texarkana, Texas. He keeps scanning, and the next vehicle to appear on his screen is a Jeep Cherokee driving around a highway cloverleaf between San Diego and Anaheim, California. Then he locates a Dodge Durango, moving along a rural road somewhere in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. When I ask him to keep scanning, he hesitates. Seeing the actual, mapped locations of these unwitting strangers’ vehicles—and knowing that each one is vulnerable to their remote attack—unsettles him.

 

[craigh]

As a quick follow-up, I did some digging into this and a few things came to light that are not yet confirmed, but make perfect sense.
1. This vehicle has a mechanical transmission, not an electronic one. This means it is physically impossible to shift into neutral, which also means it is physically impossible to increase RPM while slowing the car down.
2. The brakes are entirely mechanical (which makes perfect sense) and applying brakes cannot be done by the computer in any capacity
3. The wipers work off a mechanical stock and are not tied into any other systems, therefore also impossible to target.

This makes the whole thing more difficult, because it means that the car would have to be modified for this to work.
Maybe it's just a hit piece on Chrysler by the UAW