Hear our conversation with Miller here.
On a widely-shared video and article at Wired, a driver cruises down I-64 in a Jeep Cherokee. His air conditioning starts blasting — “I didn’t do that,” he says, half-smiling — and then the radio booms. “Perfect.” He nods in a perplexed sort of way. Wiper fluid shoots out — the wipers go nuts. He tries to shout over Kanye West: “I can’t see anything!”
The scene cuts to two men perched on armchairs, one in a Cardinals shirt, sniggering over their computers.
“Okay, do it. Do it! Kill the engine,” one says.
And then the car slowly rolls to a stop — in the right-hand lane of the highway.
Charlie Miller is one of those on the chairs: an ‘ethical hacker’ and security analyst who, with fellow hacker Chris Valasek, ran the demo that put Wired editor Andy Greenberg on a busy St. Louis highway with tenuous control of the car. Their experiments and others like it demonstrate real and pressing security concerns that companies are just starting to fix and government is just beginning to understand — for example, the cellular connection of many Chrysler vehicles, which enabled Valasek and Miller to remotely control the car. It's isn't the first time they've tried this, but it is by far the most worrisome. Especially for Greenberg.
The video of their sabotage, predictably, has gone viral since it was posted Tuesday — but Miller joined “St. Louis on the Air” back in August of 2013 to talk about his mission of exposing vulnerabilities in technology without causing harm. (And true to this, Greenberg was not harmed during his ride to nowhere.)
St. Louis on the Air discusses issues and concerns facing the St. Louis area. The show is produced by Mary Edwards and Alex Heuer and hosted by veteran journalist Don Marsh. Follow us on Twitter: @STLonAir.
