Modern cars are filled to the gills with cutting-edge gadgetry and software tools. Such tools and gadgets serve a variety of purposes in cars and other modern vehicles—occupant safety, vehicle performance monitoring, temperature and climate controls and others. As cars and carmakers become more and more technologically advanced, they leave themselves susceptible to cyber-attacks. Like other businesses, organisations in the automotive business can use some of the following data security measures to safeguard themselves from such data security threats.
1. Implementing security-by-design
Security by design is a holistic approach to data security in which every component of an organisation contributes to its cybersecurity infrastructure in one way or another. Automotive companies need to implement cybersecurity by design that can defend them against nearly all cyber threats. Using a holistic approach like this to cybersecurity enables carmakers to safeguard the various phases of automotive development: design, development, building, installing hardware and software components and quality inspection.
2. Securing connected vehicles
Autonomous vehicles and connected vehicles promise to represent the future of the automotive ecosystem in smart cities. The shared data network of such vehicles must be secured with intelligent firewall systems and cloud-based cybersecurity. Taking adequate measures to secure connected vehicles will be useful for making autonomous vehicles free of data security threats.
3. Discarding unused services when they expire
Carmakers must discard the limited-duration software and hardware products when they expire. This includes decommissioning the apps, logins and user credentials associated with them. This prevents hackers from using them to initiate data breaches and attacks on the IT infrastructure of automotive companies.
The above article is authored by Sonit Jain, CEO, GajShield Infotech.
