Tesla hackers win $100,000 in whitehat competition

A group of hackers found several vulnerabilities that enabled them to hack a Tesla vehicle and they won over $100,000 for their effort.

Over the last few years, Tesla has been investing a lot in cybersecurity and working closely with whitehat hackers. The automaker has been participating in the Pwn2Own hacking competition by offering large prizes and its electric cars for hacking challengers.

This strategy has enabled Tesla to patch dozens if not hundreds of vulnerabilities in his systems before they can be exploited by malicious people.

Now, Pwn2Own is hosting its first-ever event exclusively about the automotive industry in Tokyo this week, and hackers are mostly going after Tesla’s infotainment system and EV charging stations.

Zero Day Initiative, which is behind Pwn2Own has confirmed that a team of hackers has managed to chain some bugs to exploit Tesla’s infotainment system:

Synacktiv has been dominant in the Tesla hacking space, and it also won a $100,000 prizes when hacking a Tesla last year.

This year, they also demonstrated another successful attack on the Tesla modem:

In all, the team has won $450,000 in prizes for its exploits at the first Pwn2Own automotive event.

Several hackers also managed to take control of various different charging stations.

Electrek’s Take

With vehicles being increasingly connected, there’s an increased fear of hacking becoming a problem in automobiles.

Initiatives like this help automakers stay ahead of the bad guys. Tesla also runs its own bug report program open to whitehat hackers with generous rewards.

We went into a lot of detail about Tesla’s cybersecurity effort in our report about “The Big Tesla Hack” when a hacker managed to get control over Tesla’s entire fleet.