The next time your traffic-enabled GPS notifies you of an "incident" along your route, you may want to do a quick virus-scan before taking the next highway exit. Turns out hackers at the CanSecWest conference successfully proved they were able to send bogus traffic and weather messages via RDS out to traffic enabled devices.
Annoyances aside, there are some pretty serious safety / Homeland security concerns around keeping real-time traffic data secured. For example, there's a traffic alert code reserved for notifying citizens of a terrorist attack. Erroneously sending out a message to thousands of motorists that there's been a massive terrorist attack could cause mass-panic as drivers frantically try to flee the area.
Continue reading "Coming Soon: Symantec AntiVirus for GPS?" »
Worst yet, since RDS TMC feature will be offered to GPS manufacturers for free or included in the price for mapping software by TA and NT, most if not all GPS will include RDS features in the future.
As more units are built using Windows CE this will be a huge problem. CE shares many of the same programming and virus traits of full blown Windows and we all know how insecure Windows is.
Makes sense that Symantec woul love to get their AV stuff into this insecure and growing platform.
IMHO just say no to Windows CE powered devices and we can all will be better off.