When is your car not YOUR car?

18 Tamuz 5773

When the government started offering people money to take these old clunkers off the road, I should have realized that there was more behind it than safety or environmental concerns. The goal is that every vehicle on the road will be recent enough to have computerized systems. This makes the vehicle owner vulnerable, not only to EMP attack, but to cyber-attack as well!

When I heard about the circumstances surrounding the untimely death of journalist Michael Hastings - that he was traveling at excessive speed at 4 am before hitting a tree and bursting into flames - I immediately wondered if someone had tampered with the accelerator. Little did I know how easy such tampering has become.

There is now so much on-board circuitry that your vehicle can be hijacked and remotely controlled. And that's besides allowing people to monitor your conversations, your travels and your location!

Friend: Michael Hastings Was Working on “Biggest Story Yet” About CIA

A friend of Michael Hastings told Fox News today that the Rolling Stone journalist was working on the “the biggest story yet” about the CIA before his suspicious death and that Hastings drove “like a grandma,” making it extremely out of character for him to be speeding in the early hours of the morning.

Sgt. Joe Biggs told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly that “something didn’t feel right” after Hastings sent a panicked email saying the authorities were on his tail, adding that the story of him driving at high speed in the early hours of the morning was completely out of character.

“His friends and family that know him, everyone says he drives like a grandma, so that right there doesn’t seem like something he’d be doing, there’s no way that he’d be acting erratic like that and driving out of control,” said Biggs, adding that “things don’t add up, there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered.”

Biggs said he had contacted Mercedes asking them if it was normal for their cars to “blow up to that extent” and for the engine to fly out 100 feet from the site of the crash.
Biggs also confirmed that Hastings was working on a story about the CIA and that it was “going to be the biggest story yet.”

As we reported yesterday, questions surrounding the death of Hastings are not only the domain of conspiracy theorists. Former counter-terror czar under two different presidents Richard Clarke told the Huffington Post that the fatal crash of Hastings’ Mercedes C250 Coupe was “consistent with a car cyber attack.”

“So if there were a cyber attack on the car — and I’m not saying there was,” he said, adding “I think whoever did it would probably get away with it,” and that “intelligence agencies for major powers” have such capabilities.

Clarke’s speculation that Hastings’ vehicle could have been remotely hijacked is echoed by Salon.com’s Andrew Leonard, who cites two studies by researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, “Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Vehicle,” and “Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces.”

The studies detail how “it is a relatively trivial exercise to access the computer systems of a modern car and take control away from the driver.”