Posted on July 29, 2017 at 12:05 PM

Tesla’s Model X Hacked by Chinese Researchers

Chinese security researchers informed Tesla of the vulnerabilities in their Model S last year, for which the company took immediate steps to fix them. This year round, the same security researchers successfully hacked another Tesla car, Model X, and managed to take control of the vehicle’s brakes remotely. As well as this, they found a way to open the doors and the trunks and even play music via car’s radio.

Researchers responsible for the hack were the same researchers that found a loophole in the system last year – workers at the Keen Security Lab, part of the Chinese tech giant Tencent. Their director, Samuel Lv, spoke about informing Tesla of the loopholes in June. The company managed to fix them in just two weeks. What the researcher did was hack the car in question with malware, sending it to the car’s web browser in a series of circuitous computer exploits. By doing this, they succeeded in gaining control of the car through Wi-Fi and mobile connections.

The lead researcher at Keen Security Lab, Sen Nie, stated that the lab informed Tesla of their findings last year, which the firm then corrected and added that this time around, new vulnerabilities were found that let the researchers reproduce the same remote control of the car.

Tesla spoke about the research, stating that the company encourages such tests that ultimately lead to preventing potential problems. Tesla also noted that there’s no high risk for such issues to happen to customers and that no one has been affected.

The company is known for using cutting-edge technology and over-the-air software updates. And now, Adam Jones, a Morgan Stanley analyst has stated that Tesla’s autopilot system just might render all cars obsolete.

The analyst wrote in a note to investors that the company’s automatic features will represent the future of the automobile industry. Jones believes this is due Tesla’s vertically integrated in-house software capabilities and continues with stating that the company’s willingness to assume the risk of hacking is what makes a difference.

Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk was at the National Governors Association a couple of weeks ago and talked about cyber-security, among other things. He also talked about how he believes the company is looking to battle similar security issues.

More and more connectivity features make vehicles easier to hack than ever, and Tesla cars have a great number of them. This makes the cars hackers’ favorite target. Musk spoke about the security areas and the patches the company is researching for when their cars become fully autonomous.

Musk also said that fleet hacking is their biggest concern and that is it something they as a company are focusing on. He continued by saying that if a car had a driver inside it, the said driver should always have the authority and have a button that would allow the person driving to cut all connections to servers in case of a hack happening.