Its too easy to hack a semi truck

In a few weeks, in a hotel parking lot in Houston, Texas, the National Motor Freight Traffic Association (NMFTA) team will make a tanker truck do some very troubling things.

It’s going to chuff its brakes and it’s going to make strange and uncomfortable noises, an indication that the truck is dumping its pneumatic air supply, which is not an example of optimal vehicle performance. But we’re going to make it happen.

The alarming part of this demonstration? We won’t even have to get in the truck to do it, nor will we need to take advantage of modern wireless technologies like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

Instead, Ben Gardiner, NMFTA’s senior cybersecurity research engineer, will use a budget antenna of two wires, through which he will deploy radio frequency signals to send the command to the trailer powerline network. That’s it.

This alarming live demonstration of how easy it is to hack into a vehicle using rudimentary technology should make everyone nervous. That’s why we’re hosting the Digital Solutions Conference on Cybersecurity in Houston, Texas, Oct. 22-25.

Our goal is to help LTL carriers understand the gravity of how important cybersecurity is to our industry and to learn how to prepare for and prevent a cyberattack.

It shouldn’t be this easy to hack into an LTL truck, but it is because the trailer brake controllers use code from the 1980s. The controllers themselves were developed in the ’90s by sticking converter chips in front of the existing code, from an era when no one had any reason to worry about things like encryption or authentication.

We’ve seen more than a few vulnerabilities in assets over the past few years. And one big problem where the assets are concerned is that it’s far too easy for skilled hackers to commandeer a trailer’s diagnostic system. That’s because this same 1990s technology (trailer powerline networks) is still prominent on all trucks and trailers in North America since 2001. Fleets love to get decades’ worth of service out of their vehicles, and even in the 1990s truck manufacturers were doing an excellent job of building in quality that would stand the test of time. But cybersecurity wasn’t on the…