Amazon has announced its “Key In-Car” service, delivering packages directly to people’s connected cars. IT security experts commented below.
David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab:
“Amazon’s latest service – a continuation of their Amazon Key deliveries to the home – feels like another huge test of consumer trust, especially given the flaws that the Key system presented. I suspect that the public may not be comfortable sharing access to their vehicles with a third-party and they should be wary of this new development. The window for delivery access proposed by Amazon is short, but could feasibly be compromised by hackers. Equally, there is the prospect of cyber criminals accessing the data of customers, either by theft from Amazon itself or by hacking the customer and masquerading as them. This, too, is concerning.”
Engin Kirda, Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Lastline:
“This incident is yet another BGP-hijacking attack that is quite well-known.
We have seen such attacks (or bugs) in the past and the incident reminds me of how Pakistan managed to redirect a lot of Youtube traffic back in 2008 (https://www.cnet.com/news/how-pakistan-knocked-youtube-offline-and-how-to-make-sure-it-never-happens-again/).
What we are actually seeing is that the main routing infrastructure of the Internet in the last 10 years has not really changed and that such attacks are still possible today. Unfortunately, though, we are now faced with adversaries that are more motivated and that want to make a quick profit as the Amazon attack now demonstrates.”
