An anonymous reader writes: Two hackers from iSEC, who will demonstrate their findings at next week's Black Hat USA conference, have successfully reverse engineered the protocol used to control a car's on-board computer. Using off-the-shelf parts to make an ad-hoc GSM network, the researchers simply sniffed the traffic between the car and a remote server, worked out the protocol, and then sent control messages from a laptop straight to the car to unlock it.
If that wasn't scary enough, Don Bailey (one of the researchers) said this: "What I got in two hours with the car alarm is pretty horrifying when you consider other devices like this, such as SCADA systems and traffic-control cameras. How quick and easy it is to re-engineer them is pretty scary." SCADA is a catch-all that covers the networks used to control traffic systems, oil refineries, pipelines...