his car s 0k. it s the wallbox charger that s been hacked and turned off. and it gets worse. because hackers can access the firmware of this second charger, the project ev, they can disable this permanently. both chargers have been approved for sale in the uk by the government s department for transport. so how can this happen? well, thankfully, the good guys have found the problems first. the number of so called white hat hackers is growing fast. these are the people who test systems and products to find flaws before anyone else does. vangelis is the hacker who found the security failures.
you can go places tomorrow. but all is not as it seems because this smart charger has mysteriously switched off. next day, our man is off to an important meeting, no doubt, and to show off his flashy new motor. but he s going nowhere because his tican can t. its battery is still flat. his car s 0k. it s the wallbox charger that s been hacked and turned off. and it gets worse. because hackers can access the firmware of this second charger, the project ev, they can disable this permanently. both chargers have been approved for sale in the uk by the government s department for transport. so, how can this happen? well, thankfully, the good guys have
to norway in its adoption. but while things are moving at a pretty fast pace here in iceland, the uk is still trying to increase the number of publicly available charging points to help with the switch to electric there, and that means that home charging points are a must have for early adopters. but here s a question i bet you ve never asked yourself how secure is your charger? weird question, i know, but dan simmons has been investigating how your charging point could be turned against you. ready to plug in. well, the porsche does get thirsty and as many electric car owners will testify, having a charger at home is almost a necessity to make sure you can go places tomorrow. beep but all is not as it seems. because this smart charger has mysteriously switched off. beep
and it s connected to your business network, you ve potentially created a backdoor onto your network, access to potentially all of your data, and that s going to put you in a whole lot of pain. and new sharing schemes promise to make security even more important as owners of charges are encouraged to let other ev users pull onto their driveways and charge up. of chargers. thousands of these two chargers have been sold in the uk, so both pen test partners and click contacted the firms to first give them the chance to fix the problems. and we got two different responses. project ev imports chargers from a company based in china called atess. it told us.
so on wallbox, you could take full control of the charger. it could gain full access and remove the usual owner s access on the charger. it could stop them from charging their own vehicles and provide free charging to an attacker vehicle. and for the project ev, it s way worse because you can sideload finware, you can brick it, you can make it to be part a botnet and you could also make attack other servers. the problem in both cases is the lack of proper authentication between the mobile app on our smartphones often used to control these chargers and the computer servers that relay instructions to the boxes, known as apis. do you think it s an easy hike to do? could anyone do it? yes. well, the word anyone