From the “When you thought it couldn’t get any worse” department, this little gem…because it’s not enough that the feds know everything you do.  Now they can just crash your car while you’re in it, too!

At the Black Hat Asia security conference in Singapore next month, Spanish security researchers Javier Vazquez-Vidal and Alberto Garcia Illera plan to present a small gadget they built for less than $20 that can be physically connected to a car’s internal network to inject malicious commands affecting everything from its windows and headlights to its steering and brakes.

Not that that’s ever been done before or anything.

The really disturbing part is that it takes them less than 5 minutes to install the device, you’d probably never find it once it was there, and it can sit there forever, ready to be used at a moment’s notice.  This means, someone can put it on your car, then “We could wait one minute or one year, and then trigger it to do whatever we have programmed it to do.”  You know, like after you’ve written a whole bunch of articles calling for people to stand up against the federal government’s out of control policies, perhaps.  (You know what they say about paranoia: it doesn’t mean they’re not really out to get you.)

So what can this nasty little device do?

their tricks ranged from mere mischief like switching off headlights, setting off alarms, and rolling windows up and down to accessing anti-lock brake or emergency brake systems that could potentially cause a sudden stop in traffic.

Yes, because just what you want to have happen in traffic is your car stopping on a dime.  That won’t result in anything bad at all, especially at night when it also turns your headlights off.  Notice they call the headlight trick “mere mischief.”  I don’t know about you, but where I’m from, losing your headlights at night would be slightly more than mischief.  It’d be something along the lines of holy crap I can’t freaking…*crash*.  Then again, maybe that’s the point.

The best part?  It’s made out of parts you can get anywhere—which means anyone can build this: your upset ex, your recently fired employee, or your friendly neighborhood Gestapo agent from the Alphabet Soup.  Pick your poison.  Since the components are available on the open market, this also means it won’t be traceable.  So, you’ll never know if it was the feds or the nasty, militant Prius driver with the COEXIST sticker who you cut off with your smoke-belching pickup truck and then brake-checked so they could read your pro-gun bumper stickers.  (My money’s actually on option 3.  Those Prius drivers get craaaazy…not that I’d know or anything.)

So let’s recap.  Little device, parts that are readily available to anyone, and it lets anyone kill you in your car.  Oh, and soon it will be able to be controlled from miles away.

Drive safe!