Hackers crack Tesla infotainment system browser at Pwn2Own

Hackers hacked into Tesla’s infotainment system browser at the Pwn2Own fest in Vancouver, Canada. They managed to exploit a jit bug in the browser’s renderer and then get a popup on the screen saying ‘pwned by fluoroacetate’.

The two hackers of team Fluoracetate, Amat Cama and Richard Zhu, will receive 35,000 dollars in prize money for this hack, but they also get to keep the Tesla Model 3 they have been working on. It is a relatively harmless hack. Before taking over the can bus, the security system or Autopilot, the rewards were much higher, up to $250,000. The two have also found exploits in Safari, Firefox, Edge, VMware Workstation and Windows 10. In total, that will give them $375,000 in prize money, organizer Trend Micro writes.

Tesla has revealed in a response to TechCrunch that this is exactly why the company has made the car available to the competition. The company is also pleased that only the browser has been affected and that the other components, which have been deliberately separated from each other, have been left out of harm’s way. In the coming days, the American automaker will release an update to fix the vulnerability.

If all goes well, the vulnerability should be short-lived to the left or to the right. Tesla head Elon Musk announced on Friday that the browser is on the eve of an upgrade to the Chromium codebase.