When you see a car, truck or bus making its way down the road, who do you assume is control of it? This isn’t a trick question. Decades ago, there would have been one answer: the person behind the wheel. In more recent years, as vehicles became increasingly connected to the internet and driver-assist and self-driving technology grew more widespread, it’s not as clear if a driver is, well, a driver.
And in a world where vehicles can be hacked remotely — more on that in a moment — the possibility of that happening is something to take precautions to avoid. That helps explain why Ruter, a public transportation agency serving the city of Oslo and adjacent Akershus county, decided to test two varieties of electric buses: one from the Chinese company Yutong and one from the Dutch company VDL.
Ruter’s tests focused on security — specifically, to see whether or not the possibility existed of an external party either taking control of a bus or operating its camera system. The VDL buses lacked the ability to receive remote updates at all, rendering them secure for purposes of these tests. With respect to the Yutong buses, however, Ruter noted the presence of some potential security issues. One, a security vulnerability that affected a number of companies using third-party software, has reportedly been addressed by Yutong.
However, Ruter also found that it was possible that Yutong buses could be “stopped or rendered inoperable by the manufacturer.” In their update following these tests, Ruter stated that they were implenting changes that would allow them to “delay the signals to the bus” in order to better understand if those updates were benign software updates or the efforts of hackers.
The Perfect Weekend in Oslo
From eye-catching architecture to world-class food and drink programs and more, Oslo has it allAs the Associated Press pointed out in an article on Ruter’s investigation, Ruter is not the only entity testing vehicles for security reasons. It’s now been over a decade since Andy Greenberg wrote in WIRED about the experience of driving in a Jeep as it was being remotely hacked; more recently, LiveScience reported on a hack that can cause vehicles’ navigation systems to hallucinate cars and trucks that aren’t there. The ability to send vehicles software updates remotely can make certain recalls much easier to process — but it also opens the door to other risks.
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