Ransomware on the rise

While modern day automotive manufacturers have a long history of safety, security is however, a relatively new concept in terms of the connected car and the Internet of Things, as a recent survey by independent researcher The Ponemon Institute shows.

As autonomous vehicles begin to be rolled-out across the globe, hacking into software and then demanding a ransom to release it (ransomware), will become a reality. There has already been some high profile examples of hackers taking control of vehicles – one including a passenger plane!

Finnish security expert Mikko Hypponen has been in the cyber security industry for 25 years and in that time he claims that there has been a noticeable shift in the make-up of the cyber hackers and their motives – indeed in the early days there was no real motive – hackers were hacking just because they could.

He has narrowed the hackers down into five distinct categories – ‘white hat’ hackers who break security so that a weakness can be found; activist hackers, like Anonymous, who are politically but not perennially motivated; nation states and foreign intelligence agencies; supporters of extremism such as Isis; and criminals, who Hypponen says now make as much as 95% of all malware, using hacking to make millions of dollars.

It’s this last category that represents the biggest threat and the rise in the number of components in today’s cars combined with the lack of urgency and knowledge within the automaker market with regards to security, has made this into a very pressing issue – you only have to look at the rate of growth in the US market for cyber insurance to recognise that.

As other methods of transport have become more and more automated, so human controlled cars in time, could be a thing of the past on our roads, and as such, providing cyber security to this sector is going to be crucial.