I just saw an article stating that Chrysler is sending out USB drives to car owners to update the WiFi connect features in their Jeeps. For those of you that missed the story on the news, the article about it is in Wired magazine.
My guess is that this is being done to save the cost of sending out a recall letter to the million plus owners and having them bring in the cars for the software update.
The long-term effect of this short-sighted thinking is that they have now programmed these owners to accept updates to the software in their cars from the USPS, as long as there is an official looking letter included in the package – what could possibly go wrong?
The security community has been working for years to get people out of the habit of sticking random stuff they find into their computers. I remember back to the days of boot sector viruses that got installed because you forgot to remove the 3.5 inch floppy from the drive before booting up the machine. In that case, you may have ended up trashing your hard drive.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think that driving around in a hacked car is a lot more dangerous.