Hijacking your car from 10 miles away

If you haven’t seen the car-hacking video on Wired.com, consider this excerpt.

Reporter Adam Greenburg gets into an unmodified 2014 Jeep Cherokee.

“Like many thousands of Jeeps, it can be remotely hacked, through a cellular connection to its entertainment system,” Greenburg said.

Which means those new car radios also connect you to the Internet, instead of simply picking up a broadcast signal. And hackers can take a ride on that signal, into the Jeep’s computer.

And so, to demonstrate the issue, Adam pulls onto Interstate 64 in St. Louis. Ten miles away, two of his hacker friends use a laptop to remotely run the air conditioner, the wipers, and even turn up the radio, until finally &#8212 as cameras roll on both ends of the experiment &#8212 they gleefully shift the transmission into neutral while Adam is in traffic on a six-lane highway.

He had to shut the car off to reset the computer and gain control.

Let me just say, if texting while driving can get you arrested, this should send you to Gitmo.

But you see what this tells us &#8212 our enemies won’t need a dirty bomb. Just a couple of hackers sabotaging cars and trucks during rush hour.

Chrysler has issued a patch to solve the problem, but judging by the gazillion patches my computer has downloaded over the years, that won’t fix the fundamental issue, which is: the more complex a machine becomes, the more likely it is to be hijacked by insidious, outside forces.

Just ask Republicans.