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Comment by HarryHirsch | Hacker News Reader

This hack is the best argument against network-connected electric vehicles that there is. Imagine the same, but with tens of thousands of Teslas.

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I don't think it would be quite the same as in explosive ordinance put into a device but it is very similar in that a mass hack could use the navigation system to target pedestrians and calculate the speed required to plow through them without losing control to maximize victim count. All that would be required in another remote hack as has been demonstrated on live highways in the past [1] combined with some form of AI or gaming engine. A mitigating control could be more bollards near sidewalks and more hydraulic bollards on intersections that have a lot of foot traffic to confine the hacks to smaller blast zones. This won't protect the occupants but maybe drive by wire car manufacturers could start adding a "oh crap" manual handle to physically disengage power and apply some type of physical friction brake.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZVYTJarPFs [video][2 mins]

A parking garage full of electric vehicles properly compromised (at least some of them) would be very ... energetic. Burning lithium batteries aren't precisely explosive, but they are still very angry. It is plausible that you could destroy a building with a chain reaction of battery fires. That is one of the safety concerns I think might not yet be fully accounted for (what happens when a bunch of electric cars are in a full closed lot and one of them starts on fire).

Any of the smart plugs or other devices plugged directly into the grid could be intentionally compromised to start a house fire. Millions of homes simultaneously catching fire would be catastrophic. Apartment buildings where a fire starts in 10%+ of the units.

This is a strong statement that probably isn’t true. The power transformers in those devices usually aren’t controlled and the things which are controlled will only sometimes be able to start fires. No doubt that some “smart” devices will have vulnerabilities that could cause fire, but just because there’s an available controller does not mean there’s an avenue to set fire to a device.

In short, unless a device is profoundly poorly designed, there’s no way to blink an LED so incorrectly that it starts a fire. (And many smart devices really aren’t doing much more than that)

The greater concern is lithium batteries catching fire while they are being charged. NYC seems to have a problem with dubious e-bikes already. If a few hundred or thousand battery controllers become compromised and the battery pack is charged with too much current it's like the bat bomb on testosterone.

Homes have surge protectors though that are out of band of the smart plugs.

> maybe drive by wire car manufacturers could start adding a "oh crap" manual handle to physically disengage power and apply some type of physical friction brake

It depends on the manufacturer, but I think this is already the case with Tesla cars? The brake specifically isn't drive-by-wire, it's an electrically assisted hydraulic brake - so even if a malicious actor could get the car to not do the assist part anymore, you can still stop by pressing the pedal hard.

I feel like bollards and other form of separating roads from pedestrians are unviable on the large scale. I hope manufacturers start focusing more on sandboxing any internet-connected parts of their software and leaving the whole car-driving part inaccessible from any of that.

Not one backdoor? not even for the blues?

It's almost certainly 15 grams of RDX.

Yes, some kind of Semtex or C-4 would fit the application

It's worth noting that RDX requires a detonator. This requires more space in the device.

Not to mention phones, laptops, tables, smart watches, medical devices, children's toys, etc.

That's exactly why the "software hack" doesn't make any sense

No battery powered gadget as ever exploded like that ever

That's a battery explosion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR7_xwQbYp0

That's a bomb: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605

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