Hackers Take Over a Tesla Model S Car

Hackers have found a way to take over a Tesla Model S and turn the car off while it was driving.

Luckily, these were “white hat” hackers who were testing Tesla’s system for vulnerabilities, Financial Times reports. Once the two experts—Kevin Mahaffey, chief technology officer of Lookout, and Marc Rogers, principal security researcher at Cloudflare—physically connected to the car via an ethernet cable, they were able to take control of its screen.

“We shut the car down when it was driving initially at a low speed of five miles per hour. All the screens go black, the music turns off and the handbrake comes on, lurching it to a stop,” Rogers told the FT. He and Mahaffey could also change the speed on the speedometer, raise and lower the windows and lock and unlock the car.

Tesla is making a fix for these security flaws that drivers can download Thursday.

[Financial Times]