Electric vehicle warning: Hackers can cause ‘real damage’ to car with charging cable

Electric vehicle infrastructure is vital for transition says expert

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Experts at GuardKnox, an Israeli-based cybersecurity company, have warned electric vehicle owners of the potential for their cars to get hacked. There has been a huge spike in EV ownership rates over the last few years, with September seeing electric cars outsell diesel vehicles in the UK as it now has almost a third of the vehicle market share.

Electric vehicles saw a 137 percent increase in sales year-on-year compared to a 46 percent decrease with petrol cars and 77 percent decrease with electric vehicles.

With more people choosing to buy a new or used electric vehicle, there are fears that they could be particularly prone to being hacked.

Keyless car thefts have increased over the last year as criminals can use relatively simple technology to bounce the signal from the key to the car in order to steal it.

But GuardKnox are warning that a larger hack on electric vehicles and their infrastructure could have devastating impacts on the automotive industry.

Moshe Shlisel, the CEO and co-founder of GuardKnox, spoke of the far-reaching implications a hacker could cause to an electric car and its network through the charging cable.

Speaking exclusively with Express.co.uk, he said: “If I’m a sophisticated hacker and I would like to do some real damage I can install a malicious piece of software that will be disseminated automatically while other cars are connected to the same charging station.

“So you have an infected charger that can infect other cars, like a pandemic.

“Every other car contaminates another charging station and so on and so forth, then you have a contaminated transportation community.

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“This includes all the EVs in that area and if you’re talking about a continent and there is the ability to go from one country to another, you are just disseminating this malware elsewhere.

“Now if you’re talking about the home, if your car is hacked, they can install a malware which will reside in your smart home network.

“Then all your data is being cloned, so the main takeout from EV charging is that the car is the most important thing in the automotive system.

“If you hit the car, you can go various ways. From there a hacker just needs to decide where they want to go, what damage they want to inflict.”

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