Tag: Hacker
How To Of The Day: How To Become A Hacker
Most people jeer at the word “hacker,” assuming some angry geek is holed up in his parents’ basement, plotting against the government and stealing eHarmony user passwords.
The term has earned a bad rap over the years, with the help of groups like Anonymous. But hackers are people, too.
People like information security analysts and computer programmers, who make a living out of professionally hacking. And a fairly decent living, according to an infographic from Schools.com, which breaks down the negative connotations and provides a guide on how to become a hacker.
How To Of The Day: How To Make A Watermelon Keg
Household Hacker demonstrates how to make a keg out of a watermelon in this instructional video.
Need I say it? Enjoy!
Let’s save some money and build our own keg out of a watermelon. If you have access to a 3D printer, the awesome people at Robo3D built a sweet tap just for this video. If you don’t, there are other options as well so no one has to sit this one out.
How to Hack a Car
Most people aren’t aware that their car is a high-tech computer. You could say that modern cars are smart phones on wheels.
In this episode of “Phreaked Out,” we met some of the top security researchers at the center of the car hacking world. The goal isn’t to make people crash: They highlight security holes in order to highlight flaws in car technology, intended to pressure auto manufacturers to be a few steps ahead of their friendly foes.
Information security researcher Mathew Solnik gave us a first-hand demonstration on how to wirelessly send commands to the car and remotely tell it what to do. With a little over a grand and about a month of work, Solnik found time outside of his full-time job to reverse-engineer a car’s computer system to make it ready for a takeover.
From his laptop, he was able to manipulate the car’s engine, brakes and security systems by wirelessly tapping into the Controller Area Network, or CAN bus, network. Without getting too deep into the details—both for legal reasons and due to my own training-wheel knowledge of such things—he was able to do so by implementing some off-the-shelf chips, a third party telematic control unit, a GSM-powered wireless transmitter/receiver setup, and a significant amount of know-how he’s accrued over the years.
The reason for such additional hardware was to make our older, mid-sized sedan function like a newer—and arguably more vulnerable—stock vehicle, which these days often come with data connections. (We would have loved to tinker with the latest, most connected car on the market, but since we were on a shoestring budget and it’s incredibly hard to find a friend who’s willing to lend their car for a hacking experiment, our pickings were slim.)
With that said, a car whose network system is connected to a cloud server and accessible by Bluetooth, cell networks, or wi-fi is potentially vulnerable to intrusion.
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