There is no official information available at the moment

Jul 18, 2014 20:50 GMT  ·  By

The car has been subjected to the treatment of hackers at the SyScan security conference in Beijing this week, and its systems have been breached, allowing the attacker control over locks, horn, headlights and skylight while the car is in motion.

News of the event has been posted on the Sina Weibo social media account of Qihoo 360 Technology, a security company that is also one of the organizers of the Beijing security event, according to Bloomberg.

However, at the moment there seems to be no additional details about the feat and how it was pulled off as no official comments have been made.

The only additional information is delivered by Wu Jing, a director of investor relations for Qihoo 360, who said that the experiment was conducted by the technology department of the company.

Before the conference started, its organizers said that they would bring a Tesla Model S electric car and offer a $10,000 / €7,350 prize to the hacker who manages to break into its system.

Only certain forms of attack would be validated during the contest, such as controlling the car from a remote computer or make the user land on web pages delivering malware through the web browser in the dashboard.

Tesla, the company developing the electric car, is not involved in any way in the competition. The car has been chosen by the organizers because its developer already implemented a bug hunting program that allowed it to patch a large set of vulnerabilities.

Given its commitment to security of the vehicle, it is no wonder that Tesla will be investigating the flaws and then proceed to eliminating them. In a letter to Bloomberg, the company said that it supported the idea of an environment where “responsible security researchers can help identify potential vulnerabilities.”

Tesla also hopes that the security researchers that found the glitch would disclose it responsibly to the company, so that the necessary steps can be taken to mitigate the risks.

SyScan security conference is designed to offer a place for the best security experts to meet and share their research and discoveries.

Qihoo 360 said that details of how the hack was carried out will be published on the conference website.

Although taking control over the locks, horn, lights and skylight may not seem like too much of a problem, the vulnerabilities in the car’s system may lead to more serious issues that could affect the way the engine works and even the data presented to the driver on the dashboard.