Thomas Fox-Brewster reports:
There’s been growing interest in car hacking in recent years, inspired by researchers showing off exploits in real vehicles, tinkering with Teslas, and uncovering glaring vulnerabilities in third party kit. But criminal hackers could vex drivers in other ways, such as compromising internet-connected, easily hackable parking management systems, according to Spanish researcher Jose Guasch. At the Hack In The Box security conference in Amsterdam later this month, he will present some shocking weaknesses in as yet unnamed parking software, which he claims could be abused to take control of car parks, including their physical barriers and displays, or steal driver credit card data and personal details, or acquire free parking spaces.
Read more on Forbes.
And once again we see entities not responding to a researcher’s attempts at responsible disclosure (emphasis added by me):
When he came across the gaping security holes in the vendor software in June 2014, he contacted the Spanish branch, but to no avail. Further attempts to warn the provider in February 2015 also elicited no response. That’s despite his warnings he could access credit card data from compromising the software’s remote access tool, just by searching the tickets folder.
Where are the consequences for not responding to notification of a vulnerability? Yes, the entity may suffer a breach and have breach costs eventually, but where are the added penalties for “you could have avoided this if you’d only listened and looked?”
Should researchers report their findings to data protection offices when entities don’t respond with a note that they will publish their findings in X amount of time so someone better get the company/entity off the dime?
I don’t know the best solution, but it shouldn’t require researchers taking risks that could put them in jail to get those who collect and store our information to keep it safe.