What if your car was as vulnerable to hack into as your laptop? The reality is cars today are basically a computer on wheels. According to Car and Driver, 40 percent of a new car’s cost is driven by electronic components. The New York Times reported that a modern vehicle could contain more than 3,000 computer chips. Electronics are such an essential part of a car’s design that the shortage of semiconductors due to supply chain disruption from the pandemic has impacted auto assembly lines worldwide, creating a lack of new vehicles on the market.

By introducing computer systems into vehicles, hackers have found ways to exploit their vulnerabilities. In 2015, Black Hat security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek hacked a Jeep Cherokee via its infotainment system. Miller and Valasek exploited how the vehicle autogenerated its Wi-Fi password based on the time when the car’s multimedia system would turn on. Through the infotainment system, the hackers could manipulate the air conditioner, the radio, the windshield wipers, and even the transmission. On a road test with Wired magazine, the hackers cut the transmission as the vehicle was driving 70 mph on the highway. This past February, German teenager David Colombo identified a vulnerability in the TeslaMate, a third-party application used by Tesla owners to analyze car performance. By hacking the app, Colombo was able to unlock doors, turn on and off the headlights, and control the radio. He was even able to track in real-time the location of the car.