Having your car tell you when your tire pressure is low is a rather handy little feature and saves you from having to bend over slightly on the odd occasion to do a visual inspection.  That convenience needs to be balanced with security, as tends to be necessary.  It seems that the wireless signal that the tires send to the car’s processor every 60-90 seconds can be used to hack into the electronic control units of various systems on the car ranging from the windshield wipers to the brakes.  Some of the hacks can be simply annoying, turning on a variety of warning lights or starting your wipers are not too much of a concern, being able to track your car anywhere is more of a concern but disabling the brakes and giving you a real life Toyota Simulator is pretty serious.  The only good news is that Ars Technica reports it requires a good $1,500 of radio sensors and special software to pull off the hack.

“The tire pressure monitors built into modern cars have been shown to be insecure by researchers from Rutgers University and the University of South Carolina. The wireless sensors, compulsory in new automobiles in the US since 2008, can be used to track vehicles or feed bad data to the electronic control units (ECU), causing them to malfunction.”

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk