Hackers love exposing Tesla’s electronic weaknesses. Just this August, researchers showed how they could use jamming and spoofed signals to convince the Tesla Model S autopilot that real objects had disappeared or fake obstacles had appeared.
A year before, researchers prized open a Tesla’s dash and attached computers to kill the car mid-drive. And today hackers from Tencent’s elite KEEN Team hacker crew claimed to have demonstrated the first remote exploit of Elon Musk’s vehicles, making the potential for real-world attacks a little more realistic.
A year before, researchers prized open a Tesla’s dash and attached computers to kill the car mid-drive. And today hackers from Tencent’s elite KEEN Team hacker crew claimed to have demonstrated the first remote exploit of Elon Musk’s vehicles, making the potential for real-world attacks a little more realistic.
KEEN Team said it had informed Tesla’s security team of multiple vulnerabilities in the latest models running the most recent software. They will not be detailing the weaknesses in detail until the problems have been fixed (Tesla said the weaknesses have now been addressed in an update). The crew said the hacks worked on various versions of the Tesla Model S and believed they would work across all marques.
The most startling exploit saw the hackers take control of a Tesla’s brakes from 12 miles away once the car’s firmware was compromised. See the video below at seven minutes in: They also opened the trunk, turned on windscreen wipers and moved wing mirrors using their laptop, all whilst the Tesla Model S P85 was moving at a low speed.
The hackers started off by showing how they could control lights, windows and chairs when the car was stationary. They then moved on to taking over the dash software of a Tesla Model S 75D when in parking mode. There appeared to be a limitation on the latter attack: it required the driver to first search for a nearby charging station. It’s unclear if the same limitation or another affects the attack on the brakes.
Tesla told media it had issued an over-the-air update, having quickly addressed the vulnerabilities. The KEEN Team hadn’t responded to requests for comment either, though they did note on Twitter the hacks could be achieved with some browser-based exploits
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