Cars as weapons: Could hackers be part of the growing problem?

The girl’s three-year-old sibling remains in a critical condition, but the French police has ruled out terror as a motive in the pizzeria attack. Several other countries have seen cars used as weapons recently. While some attacks are claimed by ISIS, other attacks have been blamed on age, mental health, confusion, alcohol or drugs.

A French government spokesman also said that it was “unlikely” the incident was terror related, while the public prosecutor’s office in Meaux described the incident as “deliberate”, adding too that it “has nothing to do with a terrorist act”.

The incident occurred less than a week after an Algerian national was arrested on suspicion of deliberately ramming a hire car into a group of soldiers in a Parisian suburb, injuring six. The soldiers, on a counter-terrorism patrol, were attacked in the wealthy Parisian suburb of Levallois-Perret, and French counter-terror prosecutors have opened an investigation into the terror attack.

According to French media reports, the alleged Algerian jihadist was shot wounded four hours later in the north of France. The arrest took place on the A16 motorway when police opened fire on the suspect. Two soldiers were seriously injured and taken to the Percy military hospital, but four others escaped serious injuries.

France has narrowly avoided serious terror attacks in recent months after police, soldiers and security forces followed up on terror suspects, but ordinary French voters see no sign of the attacks abating.

An 18-year-old “mentally ill” jihadist who shouted “Allah Akbar’’ and brandished a knife at the Eiffel Tower at the weekend was also arrested. In June, a jihadist rammed a car loaded with guns and a gas bottle into a police van on the Champs-Elysees, the second such terror attempt after an earlier shooting in the same location.

In the same month, three jihadists in a white van rammed into pedestrians on London Bridge, in the UK’s capital on June 3 before going on a knife rampage through the adjacent Borough Market precinct. Eight people were killed and the three perpetrators were shot dead by police.

In May, one person was killed and 22 were injured when a car struck pedestrians in New York City’s Times Square, but according to the mayor, there is “no indication that this was an act of terrorism”.

In February this year, one person died and two others were injured after a man drove a rental car into a group of pedestrians near a bakery stand in Heidelberg, Germany. “There are no indications of a terrorist background,” police spokesman David Faulhaber told reporters, but could give no possible motives for the attack. The German police later tweeted that the attacker, subsequently shot by police, was “German” and not a migrant, to the relief of many open-border enthusiasts.

After a taxi ploughed into pedestrians injuring at least 10 near Boston’s Logan Airport in the US, Massachusetts State Police said they were looking at possible “operator error”, The Independent reported, while another report said the driver may have been “elderly”. Police said the incident on July 3 was an “accident” and not terror related.

Police in Sweden similarly said a car that rammed into people outside a health centre in southern Stockholm, injuring three seriously, was an accident. The driver was described by Swedish media as a woman in her 80s who got “confused” and crashed into people outside the Vardcentral Hogdalen.

Reported as an “accident”, fears of another ISIS attack were immediately lowered, with most feeling relieved that it was not another case of a jihadist behind the wheel of stolen vehicle killing five pedestrians and injuring 14, as happened in central Stockholm on April 7.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, one woman died and 19 were injured on Saturday when a car rammed a crowd of counterprotesters gathered to oppose a “Unite the Right” rally. The driver was quickly identified as a a “white terrorist” without mental or drug problems, road rage or other issues such as old age and confusion.

The driver was charged with one count of second-degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding and one count of hit and run, according law enforcement. The FBI is still investing the car crash, vibe.com reported.

In 2011, researchers at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Washington made public ways to hack into a Chevy Impala’s wiring, including a hacked smartphone connected to its infotainment system via Bluetooth to a CD containing a malicious file inserted into its CD player.

UCSD researchers also showed that common, Internet-connected insurance dongles plugged into vehicles’ dashboards could create the same remote hacking vulnerabilities.

Carmakers acknowledge that any such breach is now possible. “You need to know what hackers are going to do next, how to mitigate it, and how some mitigations don’t work, which is what we’ve shown,” security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek noted. Miller, was a former staffer at the NSA.

Miller and Valasek took control of a car and crashed it into a ditch in 2015 by remotely breaking into its systems from several kilometres away whilst sitting in their living room. The engine cut out and the brakes were applied on the Jeep Cherokee, sending it into a spin.

They claimed at the time that some half-a-million cars from just one manufacturer, also in the UK, could be at risk of being attacked by similar means. The American hackers said they used just a laptop and mobile phone to access the Jeep’ s on-board systems via its wireless Internet connection causing the accident.

Miller and Valasek both warned that it was only a matter of time until hackers found a new method of gaining remote access to vehicles. And when they do, this is the kind of attack they’ll be able to pull off, Wired reported. “There’s no reason to think the bug we found and got patched last year is the only bug of its kind. There are definitely more vulnerabilities in other cars, and probably more in the Jeep, too.”

Chrysler announced a recall for 1.4 million vehicles after the pair of hackers demonstrated to WIRED that they could remotely hijack a Jeep’s digital systems over the Internet. Their full-speed attack on the Jeep’s steering and acceleration is what could happen the next time hackers find a wireless grasp on a vehicle’s network.

Miller and Valasek both now work at Uber’s Advanced Technology Center. The auto hackers say: there will be another wireless car attack method found sooner or later.

“There will almost certainly continue to be remote vulnerabilities in the future,” says Karl Koscher, a researcher at the University of California at San Diego who found one of the first car-hacking techniques for GM’s Onstar in 2010. Miller and Valasek’s latest hacks show that “if you can get on the right CAN bus through those vulnerabilities, you can use these techniques to take pretty dramatic control of the car”.

A conspiracy theory suggesting the CIA may have hacked and crashed an American journalist’s car gained traction online some years ago, The Sun, a British tabloid, reported. Wikileaks suggested after a huge data breach, that the CIA may have been hacking into vehicles to carry out “remote assassinations”.

A British investigative reporter and war veteran who has been thought to be on the verge of a huge scoop that may have threatened the secretive intelligence agency.

The recent “accidents” have reduced fears of ISIS ramming into pedestrians, but what about hackers? And who do they work for?