Remote-controlled cars
Someone hacking your computer can be an inconvenience. Someone hacking your car can be deadly.
A pair of presentations on hacking cars kicked off the DefCon conference on Friday. Australian hacker Zoz outlined the security issues fully autonomous cars will face and said car-hacking is inevitable.
Autonomous vehicles like cars and drones are essentially robots, and they rely on sensors to operate. He said a hacker could theoretically take complete control of a car over wireless networks or trick its various sensors into feeding a motorist false information about location, speed and the proximity of other cars or objects.
Fully driverless cars are still a few years away, but computerized systems are common in vehicles on the road today. Electronic control units can control a range of car functions, including braking, accelerating and steering. They manage security features, in-car displays and even seat belts.
Researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, funded by a grant from the U.S. military's DARPA, looked into what kind of damage hackers could do to a car by taking control of a Toyota Prius and a Ford Escape.
To access the systems, they had to physically connect a computer to the cars through a diagnostics port. They wrote custom software that let them hijack the cars' systems.
Once in control, they disabled brakes, changed the display to show incorrect speed or gas levels, and messed with the steering and seat belts. They were able to kill the engine and toy with with less consequential features like the car's horn and lights.
Toyota played down the wired demonstration and said it is focusing on security measures to prevent wireless attacks.

Compromising smartphones
Attacks on personal computers used to be the bread and butter of cybercriminals, spawning a lucrative industry of black-market malware and the anti-virus programs that fight them.
The next big target is smartphones. Mobile devices are not impervious to attacks, even though walled-off app stores have kept much of the malware at bay.
Kevin McNamee demonstrated how a piece of malware could turn an Android smartphone into a "spy phone" that remotely monitors its owner, sending information on the location, communications and content, like photos, back to a third party.