A study released by a forensic consultancy has singled out the top five vehicles most susceptible to hacking.The results of the study, by PT&C|LWG Forensic Consulting Services, were based on published research by hackers, vehicle recall information and media reports.The most hackable list includes the 2014 Jeep Cherokee, the 2014 Infiniti Q50, the 2015 Cadillac Escalade, the 2010 and 2014 Toyota Prius and the 2014 Ford Fusion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An energy storage study claims that prices for certain battery technologies will plunge by as much as 60% over the next five years. The report was prepared by Australian consultancy AECOM and published by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).
The 130-page study, originally published last month, expects all battery technologies to drop in price. However, the largest reductions are forecast for Li-ion and flow-battery technologies, which are expected to plummet by 60% and 40%, respectively by 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Eighty-one percent of healthcare executives say their organizations have been compromised by at least one malware, botnet or other kind of cyberattack during the past two years, according to a survey by KPMG.The KPMG report also states that only half of those executives feel that they are adequately prepared to prevent future attacks. The attacks place sensitive patient data at risk of exposure, KPMG said.The 2015 KPMG Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey polled 223 CIOs, CTOs, chief security officers and chief compliance officers at healthcare providers and health plans.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A security researcher has posted a video on YouTube demonstrating how a device he made can intercept wireless communications to locate, unlock and remotely start GM vehicles that use the OnStar RemoteLink mobile app.
Samy Kamkar, who refers to himself as a hacker and whistleblower, posted the video today showing him using a device he calls OwnStar. The device, he said, intercepts communications between GM's OnStar RemoteLink mobile app and the OnStar cloud service.
Samy Kamkar
Hacker Samy Kamkar shows how after hacking the OnStar mobile app, he's able to use it to control a Chevy Volt.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu once wrote, "What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy."The automobile industry needs to follow Sun Tzu's advice to secure increasingly connected vehicles from hackers, according to experts.Instead of building firewalls to keep cyber attacks out, which industry watchers say is ultimately a futile endeavor, build systems that recognize what a security breach looks like in order to stop it before any real damage is done."If you hack into my car's head unit and change the radio station, I don't care. I can live with that," said Charlie Miller, one of the security experts who this week demonstrated they could hack into -- and remotely control -- a Chrysler Jeep.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A security expert who recently demonstrated he could hack into a Jeep and control its most vital functions said the same could be done with hundreds of thousands of other vehicles on the road today.
Security experts Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek collaborated with Wired magazine to demonstrate how they could remotely hack into and control the entertainment system as well as more vital functions of a 2015 Jeep Cherokee.
Both hackers are experienced IT security researchers. Miller is a former NAS hacker and security researcher for Twitter and Valasek is the director of security research at IOActive, a consultancy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two U.S. senators today filed a bill that would require the federal government to establish standards to ensure automakers secure a driver against vehicle cyber attacks.
The Security and Privacy in Your Car (SPY Car) Act, filed by Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), also establishes a rating system — or "cyber dashboard"— that informs consumers about how well the vehicle protects drivers' security and privacy beyond the proposed federal minimum standards.
"Drivers shouldn't have to choose between being connected and being protected," Sen. Markey said in a statement. "We need clear rules of the road that protect cars from hackers and American families from data trackers. This legislation will set minimum standards and transparency rules to protect the data, security and privacy of drivers in the modern age of increasingly connected vehicles."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SanDisk, known for thumb drives, memory cards and internal SSD, has announced its first line-up of pocket-sized, high-capacity external drives.The new line of drives includes four products of varying size, ranging in capacity from 120GB to 1.9TB. The new line includes the Extreme 900 Portable SSD, which uses the new, reversible USB Type-C connector with throughput up to 850MB/s.All of the drives come native with SanDisk SecureAccess software, which uses 128-bit AES encryption to password protect data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination approaches, a massive online archive has gone live containing 99,525 documents related to the Civil War-era commander-in-chief.The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a joint digitization project sponsored by The University of Illinois and the Abraham Lincoln Association, is dedicated to identifying, imaging, transcribing, annotating, and publishing all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his lifetime. Lincoln was assassinated in Ford' Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865. Creative Commons Lic.
President Lincoln with Gen. George B. McClellan and group of officers at Antietam, Md.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel today unveiled its first consumer-class solid-state drive (SSD) with a PCI Express 3.0 bus and non-volatile memory express (NVMe) high-speed host controller interface.The new 750 Series SSD's performance tops out with sequential read/write speeds of up to 2,400MBps and 1,200MBps, respectively.Unlike previous Intel consumer flash products that used a serial-ATA (SATA) computer bus interface, the new SSDs will be directly attached to a motherboard via NVMe or through PCIe interconnect. Intel
The 750 Series SSD in a 2.5-in (15mm z-height) form factor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Apple launched the new MacBook Pro earlier this month, the company claimed its performance would be double that of the previous model.As it turns out, that wasn't an exaggeration.Benchmark tests with Blackmagic software on a new 13-in. MacBook Pro with Retina display revealed it can pin the needle at more than 1,400MBps for writes and more than 1,300MBps for reads.
The machine that Computerworld tested had a 512GB PCIe M.2 form-factor flash module ($1,799) and an Intel dual-core i7 2.9GHz processor, 8GB of (1866MHz LPDDR3) RAM, and was running OS X 10.10.2 (Yosemite).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
First, the iPhone 6 arrived last year without it. Now, comes the Apple Watch. Same story. Wireless charging seems to be something Apple's going to wait on even as major mobile manufacturers adopt it.Last week, Samsung announced that its Galaxy 6 and S6 Edge smartphones will have wireless charging. Two years ago, the Windows Phone 8-based Lumia 920 smartphone had wireless charging. So it's not as if it's not becoming a more mainstream technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Samsung is mass producing the industry's first 128GB embedded flash memory based on the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard.The memory will be targeted for use in next-generation flagship smartphones and will offer 2.7 times the performance of today's embedded MultiMediaCard (eMMC) flash memory.Samsung is touting the new memory's ability to offer smoother ultra-high definition video streaming, more efficient multitasking and reduced power use.The UFS 2.0 specification, released in 2013, offers a multi-lane, serial bus versus the single-lane, parallel bus used in today's eMMC flash.The UFS 2.0 specification boasts up to 600MBps (megabytes per second) of throughput, but because it can use two serial lanes, it has a total of 1,200MBps, or 12Gbps, Samsung stated. That compares with the eMMC 5.0 spec, which has a 400MBps maximum performance over a single parallel bus.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Samsung is mass producing the industry's first 128GB embedded flash memory based on the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard.The memory will be targeted for use in next-generation flagship smartphones and will offer 2.7 times the performance of today's embedded MultiMediaCard (eMMC) flash memory.Samsung is touting the new memory's ability to offer smoother ultra-high definition video streaming, more efficient multitasking and reduced power use.The UFS 2.0 specification, released in 2013, offers a multi-lane, serial bus versus the single-lane, parallel bus used in today's eMMC flash.The UFS 2.0 specification boasts up to 600MBps (megabytes per second) of throughput, but because it can use two serial lanes, it has a total of 1,200MBps, or 12Gbps, Samsung stated. That compares with the eMMC 5.0 spec, which has a 400MBps maximum performance over a single parallel bus.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A teenager not even old enough to drive a car was able to wirelessly connect to a vehicle's internal computer network and control various functions.The 14-year-old built an electronic remote auto communications device with $15 worth of Radio Shack parts that were assembled in less than a night.Auto executives at a conference this week sponsored by the Center for Automotive Research revealed how stunned they were by the feat, which actually happened last summer, noting it shed light on the need for greater security as vehicles gain more wireless capabilities.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch
The boy, whose name is not being released, was among 30 other students ranging in age from high school to college undergraduates to PhD students who participated in the third annual Battelle CyberAuto Challenge. The year, make and models of the cars experimented on during the challenge were not disclosed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Lucas Mearian