Friday, September 11, 2015
A Black Eye
News has come out of a flaw in General Motors' OnStar GPS and communications system for vehicles. It turns out that five years ago, university researchers demonstrated a software hack of OnStar that would allow someone to take over control of a car except for steering. GM did nothing about it until this year. Apparently, the auto giant felt the vulnerability wasn't a priority until other hackers demonstrated they could take over a Jeep a few months ago. So, now GM is downloading software into millions of vehicles' OnStar systems to prevent such an event. This comes under the heading of "What were they thinking?" Certainly the company had to be aware of software intrusions elsewhere. How could it have dismissed hacking of its own vehicles for so long? It was a consumer and PR failure to have disregarded the fact that OnStar was vulnerable. One hopes after this black eye that GM will act more quickly in the the future.
Comments:
Post a Comment