Automotive Cybersecurity: More Than In-Vehicle and Cloud

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While auto OEMs and their supply chains are adding hardware and software for better cyber defenses, criminal hackers are gaining capabilities, and there are more attack surfaces to hack and exploit.

www.eetasia.com, Jul. 05, 2022 – 

There is a lot of recent activity in automotive cybersecurity across multiple segments. The good news is that auto OEMs and their supply chains are adding hardware and software for better cyber defenses. The bad news is that criminal hackers are gaining capabilities and there are more attack surfaces to hack and exploit. In this column, I will analyze and summarize Upstream Security's cybersecurity data from its four yearly automotive cybersecurity reports.

Adhering to legislative rules is one reason for recent growth in automotive cybersecurity, as is the capabilities of cybersecurity solutions – especially cloud–based services. The growing combination of connected and software–defined vehicles, however, will further expose new attack surfaces.

Detailed information on automotive cybersecurity is limited, mostly because the good guys do not want to tip off the bad guys about what they know and what they do.

In my experience, Upstream Security has the best public information on automotive cybersecurity trends. Upstream has released four yearly reports, the latest in early 2022, on automotive cybersecurity trends with a growing amount of information. Upstream also has a public database of 900+ automotive hacking events that yield more information when needed.

I highly recommend taking a closer look at Upstream information and data – including their extensive portfolio on automotive cloud–based cybersecurity solutions. For example, the first table shows some overall trends over the past 11 years. Not all data points were available for every year.

The number of incidents per year grew dramatically in 2020. Part of the growth may be that Upstream received better information as their customers and reputation grew. But most of the growth is clearly from increased hacker activities. The incident numbers for 2020 and 2021 are based on Upstream's data base mentioned above and reached nearly 900 for the two years combined. In the first quarter of 2022, Upstream added nearly 70 new incidents.

Another clear trend is the growth of remote hacks, which includes both web–based and nearby wireless attacks such as key fob hacks. Remote attacks have always been the majority and is now about 85%. The remaining attacks are physical in nature, which requires access to a vehicle.

The so–called black hat hackers are cyber criminals looking to cause damage or reap personal gains. On the other hand, white hat hackers try to uncover significant cybersecurity vulnerabilities that need to be corrected. White hat hackers are also called research–based hackers. Many companies have bug reward programs that pay white hat hackers when vulnerabilities are identified. Black hat hackers are increasing their share of cyber attacks and accounted for 57% in 2021.

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