German Teen hacks Teslas To Needle An Arrogant Elon Musk

A German teenager says he found vulnerability in a third-party app installed in some Teslas that allowed him to unlock doors, flash headlights, and blast music.

Photo Insert: Cybersecurity experts say this is the first time a vehicle has been hacked through an app that has been granted direct access to some vehicle controls and data.

Crucially, he couldn’t access steering, braking, or acceleration. So he couldn’t remotely crash your car or anything, but he could make it really annoying to be in it, Allison Morrow reported for CNN.

The hacker, 19-year-old David Colombo, said that he could even track the location of Tesla vehicles as their owners went about their day. Colombo leads a cybersecurity company and says he reported the issue to Tesla.

Yesterday, Tesla recalled nearly 54,000 vehicles over a “rolling stop” feature that turns out to be sensible in theory — after all, most people roll slowly through stops rather fully braking — but it’s actually illegal.

While cars have been hacked before, cybersecurity experts say this is the first time a vehicle has been hacked through an app that has been granted direct access to some vehicle controls and data.

Automakers need to consider “self-defending cars before self-driving cars," says Srinivas Kumar, a vice president at the cybersecurity company DigiCert. "If a car can't defend itself from an attack, do you trust it to be self-driving?"

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