A HACKER REPORTEDLY GAINED ACCESS TO TESLA’S ENTIRE FLEET

Big Hack

A new Electrek story details the saga of Jason Hughes, a whitehat hacker who says he managed to gain a flabbergasting level of access to Tesla’s internal servers — managing to seize control of the company’s entire fleet of electric vehicles.

The alleged hack took place back in March 2017, and Hughes immediately alerted Tesla’s security team, which quickly patched the security hole. Still, it’s a fascinating glimpse at the perils of connected vehicles.

Security Breach

Hughes told Electrek that he pulled the hack off by discovering an escalating series of weaknesses in Tesla’s fleet management systems. Eventually, he gained access so deep that he could look up the location of individual Tesla vehicles and even activate their “Summon” feature, causing them to drive remotely. Electrek‘s Fred Lambert, who apparently knew about the hack at the time, said that Hughes was able to provide the precise location and other information about his own Tesla.

Because of the gravity of the situation, Hughes said that he contacted the company’s head of software security directly, who asked him to prove the hack by activating the Summon feature on a car in California. After Hughes did so successfully, and submitted a vulnerability report that he has now shared online, he says that Tesla paid him an unprecedented $50,000 bug bounty.

Electric Gravy

Surprisingly, Electrek pointed out, Musk appeared to allude to the secret hack onstage at an event, just a few months after it happened.

“In principle, if someone was able to say hack all the autonomous Teslas, they could say — I mean just as a prank — they could say ‘send them all to Rhode Island’ — across the United States… and that would be the end of Tesla and there would be a lot of angry people in Rhode Island,” he said during a 2017 event in Rhode Island.

TESLA ASKS USA FOR PERMISSION TO AUTOMATICALLY DETECT KIDS LEFT IN HOT CAR

No Child Left Behind

Tesla is seeking approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to market a sensor that could tell if a child has been left in a hot car, Reuters reports.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 52 children died of heatstroke in cars alone in 2019.

To stop that from happening, the Elon Musk-led company wants to use millimeter wave sensors at power levels that aren’t allowed under current laws

Scanning… Scanning…

According to filings obtained by Reuters, Tesla’s device would use seven of these sensors. Such a radar-based system “provides depth perception and can ‘see’ through soft materials, such as a blanket covering a child in a child restraint.”

It would also be able to tell if it’s just an object as opposed to a child by detecting “micromovements like breathing patterns and heart rates, neither of which can be captured by cameras or in-seat sensors alone.

Safety First

The same system could also be used to improve current seatbelt detection technology and even “optimize airbag deployment in a crash — more effectively than existing weight based, in-seat sensor systems,” according to the filing.

Existing Tesla features, such as the Dog Mode that keeps the AC on for any dogs left behind in a car, also make use of interior and exterior sensors.

As The Verge reports, Nissan previously attempted to address the issue of children left behind in hot cars by including sensors in its 2018 Pathfinder SUV.