Car dealerships may become the next soft spot targeted by hackers intent on infecting autos with malware.
While several researchers proved over the last several months how simple it is to hack individual vehicles, security consultant Craig Smith presented a tool at Derbycon that instead goes after the diagnostic tools used by dealerships and repair shops in order to quickly infect thousands of cars, according to Wired.
The scenario has a hacker bringing an purposefully infected car into a shop for work, but when the diagnostic computer is connected the car downloads malware into the shop's computer system. The malware then configures the tools to infect every car to which they are connected.
At this point such an attack is still only a hypothetical, but Smith envisioned cases where ransomware is planted in cars or the hacker just wishes to create chaos.
