<Snipped quote by Etcetera>
Dude you're taking cyber security classes. You should be fully aware that security is always just barely one step ahead of hackers at the best of times. People have remotely hacked fucking drones, and you think that they won't be able to hack a car? Something that can't really have updates very often? Not to even mention that every car company would have their own security system, and wouldn't be using a standard program, meaning traffic wouldn't even really be fixed because there wouldn't be a unified control system. AND equipping cars with with as much sensory equipment as would be necessary would cost unimaginable amounts of money.
Why hack a car when you can shoot a gun? Because a car is incredibly more dangerous, and if you can hack one car you can hack 100. Hell, if you gave me a single car drone I could kill and maim more people than you could with a completely silent sniper rifle and perfect cover for 48 hours.
How conspicuous it would be? Have you never heard of Princess Dianna? Hacking a car to kill someone is the easiest to explain away thing in the world. "Oh there was X car trouble that the driver wasn't aware of." "Oh there was a freak accident on an icy road." Etc.
I feel that you pointed out something and then kind of ignored it. I am taking cyber security classes, and I have a full time job doing cyber security consulting. I
know the ins and outs of hacking. I'm not saying that the cars couldn't be hacked (though I will give my professional opinion that it is possible and even feasible to create an unhackable system), but I am saying that the amount of actual, malicious "car hackers" out there in the event of total automatic would be countable. As in, less than a thousand, and likely less than a hundred. Of those, very few could cause more than isolated damage and of those, probably ten or less could cause widespread damage.
This is part of the miscommunication between us; my scenario is in a unified control system—every company draws from the same database. Otherwise, yeah, it's infeasible to have zero traffic. Every car has to have a location.
Sensory equipment is cheaper than you might imagine. Machine learning is getting relatively good in that respect.
"if you can hack one car you can hack 100"
This isn't necessarily the case. You're looking at a widespread zero day exploit, which is used quickly enough by a malicious entity to cause widespread damage before patches are applied. The only organizations that can really have that kind of resources are governments. I guarantee that ISIS isn't going to have any car hacking campaigns coming up.
Sure, fair point that a car kills more, but you have to consider the magnitude of the task of hacking a car to hurt people. That's level 3 of the hacker targets: People, services, then technology. The money and intellectual resources it would take to find those exploits on a well coded system is phenomenal. Why spend 30 million dollars on a car hacking campaign that'll kill 2000 when you can spend 30 thousand dollars on ten non-self-driving junker cars to do the same? Why not hack a plane instead with that money?
It's only inconspicuous if the issues are common. If a person of known interest dies in a somewhat isolated case, it'll be suspicious regardless.
