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Tesla’s Model S Can Be Stopped By Hackers

Don’t worry, Tesla’s already working on a patch.
Photo courtesy Tesla Motors

A team of cybersecurity researchers plan to publicly detail tomorrow how they managed to hack into a Tesla Model S, they told the Financial Times today. While a total of six flaws were found, the most significant allowed the researchers to take control of the car while moving at low speeds. The researchers, from the firms Lookout and Cloudflare, will detail their findings at the Def Con security conference in Las Vegas.

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"We shut the car down when it was driving initially at a low speed of five miles per hour," Marc Rogers, principal technology officer at Cloudflare, told the FT. "All the screens go black, the music turns off and the handbrake comes on, lurching it to a stop." Rogers then explained that the car, likely as a safety measure, immediately shifts into neutral when an attempt is made to hack into it at higher speeds.

Unlike the recent Jeep hack, the researchers say that a hacker would need physical access to the Model S in order take it over.

Tesla Motors, which reported mixed earnings late yesterday, said it plans to deploy a patch by the end of today.