The hackers who remotely disabled a Jeep Cherokee during an experiment last month, put the auto industry on high and critical notice of what kind of havoc wireless attacks can wreak on vehicles.
It immediately triggered Senators Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) to introduce the Security and Privacy in Your Car Act, also known as the SPY Act, to urge car manufacturers to install bolstered IT security standards into Internet-connected vehicles to avoid them being vulnerable to more wireless attacks in the future. Part of that proposal would require car makers to make security and privacy protections more transparent via window stickers on new cars.
All this being said, a new Washington Post report expresses concern over the government prematurely stepping in and possibly interfering with potential solutions for wireless hacking of vehicles. The Washington Post article says that the hackers, who conducted the Jeep experiment and are researching the vulnerability of 24 more car manufacturers, along with software security teams, are better off focusing on the latest wireless hijacking threats for vehicles rather than being forced to abide by the government's bureaucracy from Washington.
The writer expresses fear of the government stepping in with measures that overthrow experts' current advances in using cryptography to verify messages and isolate data to avoid future wireless hacking, for example.
Should the government and policymakers alike give auto manufacturers more space to develop hacking solutions, before stepping in with measures of their own?
