Hacking just 1 in 10 cars could gridlock all of the roads in Manhattan

Going nowhere fast

Going nowhere fast

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If hackers were to infiltrate 36,000 smart cars on Manhattan’s roads – that’s 10 per cent of the vehicles in New York City – they could throw the entire island into gridlock.

Although car hacking is rare, it can be done, giving attackers complete remote control of the vehicle. “We wanted to get a sense of the worst case scenario,” says Skanda Vivek at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

He and his colleagues modelled what would happen if cars all over Manhattan suddenly came to a stop. Their simulation …

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source: newscientist.com