Hack a Tesla, Win $10,000: the Results
Recently, a competition in China was organized to see if an enterprising hacker could work their way into commandeering a Tesla Model S using only a computer and an Internet connection. The winner would get a $10,000 prize. With the advent of connected car technologies and cloud-based systems, this challenge was widely publicized, and we followed the results with great interest.
So are we in danger? Rest assured, our cars' controls won’t be hacked away from us… yet.
A group of pirates from the University of Zhejiang was indeed able to get inside the Model S computers, but all they could manage to do was fiddle with the locks, horn, headlights and skylight. Even when the car was moving, the driver was always in control of the vehicle. So even if total car control via the Internet can’t yet be achieved, it is still interesting to see that it is possible to bypass some of the Tesla’s systems.
The Palo Alto manufacturer was not associated with this challenge, but they hope that the results of this competition will be forwarded to them so they can upgrade their security suite.