image: CNN
From CNN:
Remote-controlled cars
Someone hacking your computer can be an inconvenience. Someone hacking your car can be deadly.
A pair of presentations on hacking cars kicked off the DefCon conference on Friday. Australian hacker Zoz outlined the security issues fully autonomous cars will face and said car-hacking is inevitable.
Compromising smartphones
Attacks on personal computers used to be the bread and butter of cybercriminals, spawning a lucrative industry of black-market malware and the anti-virus programs that fight them.
The next big target is smartphones. Mobile devices are not impervious to attacks, even though walled-off app stores have kept much of the malware at bay.
Webroot protects against malicious Android apps, so we've got you covered on that front if you have Webroot SecureAnywhere Mobile.
The too-smart home
Thanks to cheap, low-power sensors, anything in your house can become a "smart" device, helpfully connecting to the Internet so you can control it from a computer or smartphone. Smart home security devices have the potential to cause the most damage if hacked, and two separate demonstrations showed how to break in by opening "smart" front-door locks.
Hackers get personal
Even in the wake of this year's NSA revelations, a homemade surveillance device that sniffs out pieces of data from your various computing devices, even when they're not online, is disturbing.
Brendan O'Connor, who runs a security firm and is finishing a law degree, has created such a device, dubbed CreepyDOL (DOL stands for Distributed Object Locator; "Creepy" is self-explanatory). The device cost $57 to make and consists of a Raspberry Pi computer, a USB hub, two WiFi connections, an SD card and USB power inside an nondescript black case.
Industrial facilities
The most frightening targets highlighted at the conference were the opposite of personal.
Critical infrastructure such as oil and gas pipelines or water treatment plants are potential targets for hackers. Many industries are controlled with supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, systems.
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