A downside of Continuous Interconnectess

No sooner do Toyota have an unexplained bug in their cars acceleration, than we get this classic from Wired:

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.

“We initially dismissed it as mechanical failure,” says Texas Auto Center manager Martin Garcia. “We started having a rash of up to a hundred customers at one time complaining. Some customers complained of the horns going off in the middle of the night. The only option they had was to remove the battery.”

This illustrates another of the downsides of simple mass interconnectness without robust security and risk mitigation systems (a similar example is computer trading systems that go into a downward sell spiral).

I recall reading a Sci Fi story many years ago (70's) about a "wired" world in which a country guy with an old petrol engined, non computerised car drives into town and is nearly killed by enraged townies who se him as eco-unfriendly, but then something goes wrong with The Grid in a levee flood and all their electric cars stop with them stuck inside, and they get drowned.

The dream is to hook up all cars so they can speed seamlessly along and optimise traffic flows. The reality, unless systems are very secure and resilient, will be massive pile ups and carnage.