COULD YOUR CAR BE HACKED?

Last year's cyber attack on JLR may suggest hackers are only interested in large corporations, but we all need to be aware of the threats we face

- By Tom Jervis

COULD your car be hacked? In 2025, 612,000 UK businesses were the victims of cyber breaches and attacks, and given the way vehicles these days are digitised and interconnected almost to a fault, it's perhaps only a matter of time until criminals turn their attention to cars and their owners.

"Cybersecurity in automotive has been around for quite a while in some form or another," explains Paul Wooderson, chief cybersecurity engineer at Horiba MIRA - one of the leading firms in the development and testing of defences against cyber attacks. "But in the last 10 years it's become more mainstream as vehicles have become more connected."

Today, almost every new vehicle is connected to the internet. While some rely on embedded 4G and 5G modems to wirelessly receive data for their sat-navs, others will allow you to browse the web, watch YouTube via their infotainment systems, or unlock them via a smartphone app.

Estimates from Statista in 2023 suggested that the UK is home to more than 19 million connected cars. The figure has certainly grown exponentially since then, with each generation of new models introducing and relying on more and more connected services. The phrase “laptops on wheels” perhaps never rang truer.

This opens up drivers to a raft of threats. A study devised in 2010 by researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California San Diego was one of the first to show how little protection cars once had against cyber manipulation. Experts were able to remotely control and exploit a car’s electrical systems to kill the engine and even deactivate the brakes – both actions that could lead to disastrous consequences if performed in the real world.