Beijing Security Conference Offers $10,000 Bounty for Tesla Hack
The Symposium on Security for Asia Network (SyScan), a security conference in Beijing, is asking attendees to try their hand at hacking into a Tesla car. The conference will be full of security experts and if one of them succeeds at cracking Tesla's code, they will walk away with $10,000. The conference takes place next Wednesday and Thursday, so participants have time to prepare their hacking tactics.
While hackers target everything from pizza orders to oil companies, thus far, no one has hacked into a Tesla. John Pescatore, director for emerging security trends at The SANS Institute, told Fox News, "They have a good security reputation mainly because nobody has pounded on them yet."
However, they are still susceptible to hacks, as Tesla comes jam packed with high end technology. "These new cars, especially hybrids, have a lot more software in them that has to be updated – these paths haven’t really been probed yet by hackers. I assume for any electric car there’s a huge amount of software to optimize and control things," Pescatore said.
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The rules of the competition aren't set, but rumors speculate that the hackers must be able to operate the car’s controls remotely or use in-car touch screen to surf the web. Tesla is not officially involved in the competition.
The conference created the contest because they're curious about the inner workings of the motor. Specifically, they want to determine its safety for themselves. Though some of the best and brightest security experts attend the SyScan conference, Tesla is a formidable opponent. They employ Kristin Paget, a former Apple security expert. Apple executives nick named her "Hacker Princess." SyScan hopes to announce a Hacker King next week, if anyone succeeds in breaking into the motor.
This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/technology/2014/07/beijing-security-conference-offers-10000-bounty-for-tesla-hack/374260/
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