Keeping your car safe is an important thing. While most people take it for granted the locking your doors rolling up the windows is good enough, we’re entering a new age.

With the advent of new technology and more and more technology going into the making of your vehicles you need to understand the risks that are out there.

During the past year people have found out that something that was supposed to make the vehicle more secure could in fact be used to gain access to such critical components such as steering engine control and even the brakes.

Have you heard of the Zubie? If not check out this article that shows how this dongle used to help keep your car more secure could have actually caused problems.

Over the last year, researchers have been guessing at ways hackers might compromise cars from afar. Now, alumni of Israel’s cyber intelligence division, Unit 8200, have discovered that an innocuous American in-vehicle technology could have been exploited to remotely mess with the brakes, steering and engine. It’s the first example of such a cyber attack on a specific in-car “dongle”. And it may prove to be a watershed moment in the history of vehicular security.

Ironically, the vulnerability lay in a safety-enhancing technology known as Zubie, which tracks cars’ performance and location to offer suggestions for more efficient, responsible driving. Zubie CEO Tim Kelly says the issue has now been fixed. But the findings will do nothing to assuage fears of remote hacking of vehicles via such technologies.

Zubie consists of a number of parts. First, there’s the hardware, which plugs into the OnBoard Diagnostic (OBD2) port of a car, found underneath the steering wheel. This device communicates with the internal network of the vehicle. It also has a mobile GPRS modem that connects it to the Zubie cloud, which then feeds information to an Android and iOS compatible app.

The researchers were able to unlock the doors and manipulate the dials on the dash on an unnamed vehicle, Argus claimed in its blog post. Ben-Noon told me the team could have spent more time researching the computing languages for other functions in the car to control the brakes, steering or even the engine, but felt they had made their point. This Car Safety Tool ‘Could Have Given Hackers Control Of Your Vehicle’