Self-Driving Cars Can be Turned Into Lethal Weapons: BlackBerry CEO

Democratic vehicles, despite existence dubbed as the futurity of transportation, are inherently controlled by programs which are not 100% hack proof and can be exploited by malicious parties to wreak havoc. BlackBerry CEO John Chen stressed about hacks and attacks around self-driving cars and talked nigh the possibility of them existence used as a 'fully loaded weapon'.

"A car could easily be infected with viruses [and] is literally a fully loaded weapon. If hackers can get agree of it, yous can imagine what they could do", Chen was quoted every bit saying past Telegraph.

Self-Driving Cars Can be Turned Into Lethal Weapons: BlackBerry CEO — Epitome courtesy: KTVU FOX 2 / Reuters

The chief of BlackBerry, which is currently developing a software for autonomous vehicles in collaboration with Baidu, mentioned that driver-less cars were programmed with more lines of code than a fighter jet, which means the probability of a flaw getting exploited is much higher in the instance of autonomous vehicles. Also, the unabridged system controlling a self-driving vehicle relies on different software and code that is obtained from multiple sources, which further widens the scope of vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited.

"I can create a car I think is 90 percent virus free but as presently as that automobile gets on the road and is being used, those weather condition need to be regularly checked", Chen added. He also claimed that despite the breakthroughs and cut-border work being done in the field, information technology would take at least 5 more than years for autonomous cars to become commercially available. And before such driver-less cars striking the road, the government must enforce certain regulations and found prophylactic standards, Chen said.

In addition to the rubber problems, the BlackBerry main also expressed concerns about accountability around autonomous cars in accidents and collisions, such as incidents involving cars adult by Apple, Uber and Waymo.