Electric car charging stations and smart home chargers are highly vulnerable to hacking, as per new research by security firm Pen Test Partners. The researchers put six different home chargers and many publicly available charging stations to test in order to find flaws in them.
They found flaws in most of them, which is a serious gap in consumer protection regulations. The issues come from home chargers that are built to enable users to monitor the state of their vehicles from a distance using an app.
Your EVs can be controlled remotely
“We found vulnerabilities that allowed account hijack of millions of smart EV chargers,” Pen Test Partners‘ blog reads. As a result, the white hat hackers managed to remotely override users’ functionalities and turn the charging on and off from a distance.
In some cases, the researchers were able to “back door” their way into the EV owner’s entire home networks, eventually letting them control other devices connected to the same network. Some brands of home chargers even used cheap single-board computers.
“We love the Pi, but in our opinion, it’s not suitable for commercial use in public devices as it is very difficult to fully secure it against the recovery of stored data,” the researchers wrote.
Is buying an EV advisable?
Speaking of the public chargers, the team learned that with their ability to remotely controlling charging from a distance, the network’s cybersecurity flaws can become “a cyber weapon that others could use to cause widespread power cuts.”
Besides, many carmakers have recalled their EVs as they posed a risk of catching fire unexpectedly while charging inside owner’s garages. Charging electric cars parked in personal or public areas occasionally catch fire, even the ones that are full-on charged. But before you cancel your plans to buy an electric car, you should know they are mostly safe and much better for the Earth’s environment.
