Highway to Cybersecurity: Safeguarding Cars in the Digital Age

Welcome to another in-wheel-time podcast, a 30-minute mini-version of the in-wheel-time car show that appears wild every day. Welcome to the award-winning in-wheel-time car talk show. Coming up, we talked to Eric O'Neil about cyber attacks on the auto industry, and why you should care. Later, in Jeff's car culture, he tells us about helmets and how to protect your noggin. And Mars has fall travel tips in the state of Texas.

Well, along with Mike out of this world, Mars, we always need more Jeff Seacon, Chief Engineer David Ainsley, I'm Don Armstrong, so glad you could join us today. Hey, if we look a little bit different, well, it's because we've got a new setup. We're teasing this for quite some time, and we are here, and we've got our new green screen. Actually, this is the green screen. This is my backyard. I've got really cool cars. All the kids are out there, complaining a lot about it. A lot of rumbling going on.

Okay, listen, they're all over me. Yeah, it's been a real upset for the neighborhood here. Anyway, we're just three weeks on the air, and we thank you for joining us today, Mr. Mars. He comes to us from Neeterville, Texas. I think it's officially called Neeterland, but I like to call it Neeterville. It just has a little bit more of a... Right, a little room to... Yeah, hold me, take it to it. The affectionate way. Yeah.

We've got our new studio here, actually, and we're in Richmond, Texas, which is a suburb of Houston. So we're going to continue to call it Houston. Kind of like when we used to have the drag races over in Baytown, it was still... Houston. Houston. Yeah. And Houston, Raceway Park, and all of that. So it doesn't really make any difference. We all live in and around the Houston area. Except for you, Mars. Mars is much closer to Louisiana where he should be. Yeah, we're almost there. Yeah.

Houston, y'all keep growing though, and you'll be over here before long. Way to you, take a trip out here. We're going to have to annex you. Yeah, no, we're not. We'll never do that. Anyway, let's get right to the guest this morning. Your name is Eric O'Neill, Cybersecurity Expert, Legendary FBI Operative, Attorney and Founder of the Georgetown Group, and Nexusure AI. Works with organizations to protect themselves against cyber criminals. Eric, it's great to have you with us.

Thanks so much for joining us today. We appreciate you. Yeah. Don Jeff and Mars, it is great to be on the show. Well, thanks. So let's talk about cyber security. You know, as a regular user of the internet, nothing special. We don't do anything crazy or anything like that. I worry about cyber attacks. I worry about getting my computer infected by something that I've clicked on. And it's not porn because I know everybody here is going to go, oh, well, we know what you're looking. No.

That's not it. You know, car porn, car porn is probably more like it. Yeah. But the bottom line is, is that we are always getting hit upon, if you will, especially through emails about things that somehow some way they can hit that button where you go, huh? Well, did I subscribe to this? And you click on it. Then all of a sudden you're infected. Yeah, certainly done. And that's why I wrote my new book, Spice Lives and Cyber Security.

The idea is to explain why there are so many cyber attacks. And the simple fact of the matter is that criminals really don't care who you are. They don't care how much money you have, what you do, they only care whether you're vulnerable and they're coming after us. And by the way, the number one way that cyber criminals are now accessing our data, getting us into trouble, breaching our systems and stealing that data that not really has become the currency of our law.

Spice Lives is through social media, believe it or not, just text straight to your phone. They buy your phone number off the dark web and just send you a text that might say, hey, and if you're a polite person, a response that says I think you have the wrong number, they get you into a conversation and maybe weeks later, when you think you've made a new friend, they scam you.

So this is a long, sometimes a long play and just like you said, email is still one of the number one ways that they launch attacks against us because we still tend to trust it.

So let's, let's, let's take that thought and let's take that to the automobile industry. What does a cyber security gangster, if you will, have to gain by getting into general motors or or

Stellantis or Ford Motor Company and all of their affiliates, plus, let's not forget the information that each of them has prioritized with their company, you know, company secrets, that sort of stuff.

How does all of that get played into what you're talking about?

Well, let's talk about an attack that's happening right now against Jaguar Land Rover that has brought production in the UK to a complete halt.

Well, it's gone on for three weeks and the company has said we don't even think we're going to be able to get our systems up until I think September 24, that's another four days.

And I don't know that they're going to be able to this was a cyber criminal group. Now they, the cyber criminals call themselves silly names and I think because they're young and they read comic books, but they call themselves shiny hunters.

And and their buddy scattered spider, they all have these affiliates that work together cyber crime is a business. It is a massive industry and it is one of the most successful businesses on earth.

Right now, the cost of cyber crime flowing through the dark web sort of the evil underbelly of the internet is around $18 trillion and by next year, it'll surpass 20.

Oh my gosh, he's attackers attacked allegedly attacked Jaguar Land Rover and brought them down. I now they have Jaguar long, wherever is insane, anything, but it looks like it was a large scale ransomware attack where they get in and then they take down all of their computer systems.

And what this has done is created this massive supply chain attack, you know, factories are shut down their backups were compromised.

And it's become this reputational crisis for them where they have to decide, you know, are we going to pay this ransom or can we restore it and it looks like they're having trouble.

And just a year ago here in the United States, CDK global, which is one of the huge supply chain companies that deals with all of the car sales, right.

So if you want to sell your car, that they kind of connect you to, you know, your loans or to inventory is this big database company, they, they went down, they were taken down by a cyber crime group.

And that was 15,000 car dealerships across the United States that were down for over two weeks, where the only way they could sell a car is on paper.

And that was I think they calculated 900 million in losses and what's happening to Jaguar looks much worse.

So I mean, the longer short of this is, if you can attack car dealers dealers or if you can attack the automotive industry, what people don't realize is that is part of our critical infrastructure right now.

No, just like lights and power or water or food or telecommunications or finance, if people can't buy their cars, if people can't get a new car or even buy a used car, then that causes a crisis and it's not just money, it's reputation and people who are really upset when they can't buy that new car for their 16 year old.

Yeah, I've been with companies where they teach you how to look for bogus or different types of emails when you reply to things where you open up different attachments and that's basically how it gets started, correct.

Yes, that's one of the number one ways that this can happen. So what cyber criminals are doing is they're using old school espionage techniques of deception and posture attacks, confidence schemes, right.

And what they want to do is fool you, get them, get you to trust them and it can be an email that looks incredibly persuasive. It could, it could, for example, come from a partner or vendor or a parts detailer and it's coming to your company or to you, it could look like it comes from a family member or a friend or a business that you work with.

And you trust it because you've seen something like that before, it seems just right and then you click on a link or you open an attachment and that's how the attackers are able to launch the malicious software that compromises your computer system and what they're in, they move.

What do these, what do these criminals have to gain by this and how can they monetize it.

Well, first of all, money. So if they compromise a single individual, right, they might not make that much, but each person is a point of attack to a lot of other people. If they can get into your contact list, they can pretend they're you and then use you as a staging ground to attack all of your friends and family for a company, like what happened with Jaguar or CDK, there's a lot of money involved because if they can lock them with ransomware and create enough pain that the company says we're just going to pay you.

millions to get out of this. Well, that's a big payday. They also can use a large company attack to steal customer information to launch attacks against customers to be able to get into vendors or parts dealers or all of the different companies in the supply chain that work with that one company.

So it can be absolutely devastating. How do they catch these villains? Well, the sad thing is they very, really catch them. It's every once in a while to catch them. But most of these attackers aren't in places that have extradition. They're sitting in there, smart enough to sit in countries that don't care about cybercrime and don't extradite their criminals to the United States that every once in a while, the FBI and Interpol and DHS and all the different security agencies across the world get together and launch these campaigns.

to go into the dark web and shut them down. But bad guys have backups too. And as soon as they're shut down, they'll often just restore from their backups and come back and they just rebrand.

What can we do to protect ourselves? That's why I wrote my book. Read my book because it teaches you not only how to think like a spy to recognize the attacks. I think the number one way to defend against these things is to see them before they cause damage.

So to see when someone is using an email to attack you, to see the confidence schemes and the imposter attacks, the destructive attacks and the infiltration attacks, all the different ways that cybercriminals are coming after us.

If you can see it and recognize it, that means that you will have the presence of mine to stop. Think before you do that thing, they want you to do like clicking a link or opening an attachment or giving them access to your bank account.

And then the second part of the book challenges you to act like a spy hunter. And that's how you take the battle to the bad guys and defeat them at their own game.

So we're talking primarily about email, but what about social media, Facebook, Twitter, and I'm asking because I got a text a couple of times and it's, you know, what time are we going to dinner or are we still going to dinner?

And okay, yeah, we're still going to know. And then a little bit later it kind of realized, I don't know this person.

That's right. Well, what that, what that is is that is called a vision. That's the technical cyber security term for a fishing attack using a phone or a text.

And what they're doing there, I'll tell you a story. I tell a story in my book about a elderly gentleman who received a text just like you did and he replied because he's polite.

And he said, oh, you know, you must have the wrong number and the person on the other side started chatting with him. He was a little lonely.

So he chatted back and after a few weeks, they developed a friendship and then the person texting him his new best friend said, just so you know, I'm an investment.

And I have an investment portfolio and I specialize in investing in cryptocurrency. And you know, the elderly guy, you know, he says his name's Edward, he says, well, you know, I don't really want to get into cryptocurrency.

I have a pension. It pays me out every month. I'm great. And he said, well, why don't you just give me a thousand dollars and I'll show you. I just want to show you how amazing this is.

So he thinks he'll help out a friend. He has a thousand dollars lying around. He sends them the thousand dollars. It looks right. He sends it to a bank account.

The new best friend invests it and then shows him a website. You know, the secure portal website he logs into that shows his a thousand dollars in a month has just turned into three.

And he says, that's a 300% return rate. Edward says, well, that's amazing. How does that happen? He says cryptocurrency is different.

And so he invests everything. Everything he owns his entire pension phone. He clears it out. He moves it over his bank accounts everything into it until he's looking at a few million dollars.

And then he decides he's going to pull money out and take his his daughter and her husband and his grandchildren on a vacation, except for when he reaches out to his new best friend to take that money out.

The new best friend just gone. And this is what we call financial pig butchering. You fatten up the target until you take everything you can and then you disappear with the money.

Wow. So is it more prevalent on the individual side like you say the seniors are the elderly or is it more corporate or is it a balance of 50-50 either way?

It's very prevalent with seniors because they're looking and they actually do reconnaissance often. They will learn about you through your social media and they're looking for people who are lonely.

They're looking for people who might respond who are polite but it but it happens everywhere. Some of these attacks like the one you got is probably just a list of cell numbers that the attacker bought off the dark web and he just sends out a you know thousands of text seeing who replies.

So it's it's like going fishing right with where do he does he get the nibbles and then he might chat with I chat with these guys all the time and then finally they look me up right because you can reverse look up a phone number.

And they realize who I am and then they just rage quit but you know I try to string along as long as they can and then they rage quit. I like that term. I'm very angry when you've wasted their time for like a month and then they realize that you're a security researcher.

So Eric how do we get your book spies lies in cybercrime?

Well you can go to my website www.ericoneal.net and somebody sitting on calm but ericoneal.net and prior to the book it comes out October 7 and you want to get weekly information about how you can protect yourself.

I do a weekly breach of the week and cyber security tip of the week. I have a newsletter with the same name spies lies and cybercrime and you can go there right from my website.

Click the top banner and it'll take you right to the newsletter for free.

So if we sign up on ericoneal.net is it free?

It is. If you sign up on ericoneal.net is it free?

Well one of the ways you know that it's it's more secure is when you look at my website when you go to my website and you should look at it.

You look for the little lock near the HTTPS in your browser. That says that it's a secure encrypted website.

Now people can spoof it but if you if you click if you click the little lock you'll see that it's a secure website and you know you're safe.

So all you're giving me is your email address that's all I need so I can send you my newsletter every week.

Maybe we need that here on in wheel time. He's trying to take in wheel time from us.

No but I'm thinking that maybe we need that on in wheel time. How do we get that lock?

Well you just go to a great webmaster and they can register your website as secure so that anyone who's browsing to your website knows that they're in a secure space.

Well Mr. Mars down in the right hand corner of your screen is the one that's going to do all of that.

Eric we can't thank you enough. It's really a pleasure honor and great information.

And the book again is spies lies in cybercrime ericoneal is his name ericoneal.net.

Again thank you my friend something you comes up give us a call we'd love to have you on the ear again.

Absolutely thanks for having me on.

Thanks sir. We appreciate you back.

Just ahead Jeff's car culture and helmets for your automotive nuggin.

Nuggin. Nuggin.

I like the nuggin.

Okay well you got a nuggin. I do have a nuggin.

You got a grandchild nickname nuggin.

Plus Mars has Texas Fall travel tips after this break on the in wheel time car talk show.

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Okay, that's on me.

I have a new console over here.

I potted up the wrong thing.

And for those who don't know, potted up is not a marijuana term.

Potted.

No, it's a deal.

It's potent.

Potentiometer.

So there.

I think you should just stay with potted up.

Yeah.

We'll go with that.

There you go.

Hey, in wheel time, invite you to join us.

10 to noon, central time, every Saturday for our live show about all things automotive.

If you can hear it.

If you can potted up.

Thanks for being with us today.

Time out for Jeff's car culture helmets.

Do they really protect your being?

I don't know.

Do they?

Well, racing with its adrenaline fueled speed and daring maneuvers has always been dangerous sport.

Behind the wheel, drivers face immense risks going through curves straight away side by side and break next speeds.

The most crucial defense.

Well, it's the helmet.

In the early years of racing, drivers wore soft helmets that offered a little more protection than from bugs.

Imagine leather caps and goggles.

The bare minimum to shield their heads from the elements.

But as racing evolved, so did the deed for better safety gear.

So cloth, the soft cloth, gave way to football leather, while in improvement, it still fell short in the crash protection.

Racing was becoming faster, more intense, and the drivers needed helmets that could withstand impact.

Safety wasn't the priority, and unfortunately, the shows of the death rate of the drivers were really prevalent.

In the 50s, it saw an introduction to the first fiberglass helmets which offered improvement durability and impact resistance for their predecessors.

These hard helmets were significant step towards the terms of safety, but they still lacked the features in a modern racing racers that they were wanting for their helmets.

In the 60s, Dupont introduced the game changer called Nomex.

This flame resistant material formed the basis of fireproof racing helmets.

With the risk of explosions during accidents, Nomex was a crucial part for the safety of the drivers.

In the 70s and 80s, the introduction of the full-face helmets, which was significantly forward, these helmets with fire protective hoods, protective drivers from debris and fire.

Visors became standard, enhancing the eye protection also, with the advent of the computer-aided design or CAD,

allowed for more precise shaping of the customized of the helmets for the person's head and the individual drivers as well.

This led to the increased comfort and reduced fatigue during long races and further enhancing the safety.

Then we come up to the 90s, where aerodynamics took the center stage, sneak helmets reduced air resistance enhancing performance.

The 2000s brought lightweight materials, ensuring both safety and agility, because there's a lot of lightweight stuff on your neck.

Helmets are a marvel of engineering, made primarily from a combination of carbon fiber and Kevlar.

The weight adjusted is about 2.7 pounds, or 1.25 kilograms if you're in need reveal.

These helmets consist of about 12 layers, with the top layer adorned with bright designs and sponsor logos. Those are fantastic.

Helmet restraint devices reduced the likelihood of head and neck injuries during crashes. Helmet restraints included straps and attached to the side of the helmets, which prevented sudden head movements, basically to help in the crash.

However, these devices were not widely used in the motorsports in the 80s or 90s, only after the Dale Earnhard incident in 2001 on the last lap of Daytona was more focused, given to the Hans device.

Looking into the future, aerodynamic shapes, integrated cooling systems and helmets more advanced than ever before.

They're actually considering putting a head up display in the visor of the helmet, which I think is cool.

I've got a head up display on my car. I use it all the time, since it's fantastic.

You know, I got one of my old Corvette. 2001 Corvette's got a head up display. It was an option back in the day.

I use mine all the time. I think it's cool. There you go. Protect your head when you're driving in the race car.

Mr. Mars? Yes, sir. I see. Go ahead and put yourself back up there. Why did you minimize yourself? We wanted to see you.

Could you do that? I can do that. No, we want you full screen.

Mars is buried in papers over the papers and there you go. I've got to get resituated.

I like the way that you're at the beach with 80s cars. He's got a storm brewing in there.

Yeah, there's another word for that. Yeah, that's it.

Look at all the papers that he's got. Well, I had him all in order and David told me to move him and I did and now I'm all out of order.

Why? Did you not just move the whole stack? Well, I did. That was the problem.

Oh my God. When you get to the east, they think different. He got to post it. No, not in the back of that paper.

Is it important? Yes, it is. That's so I can find it. You can't find it. All right, we're moving on.

Time now for Mars driving destinations. Fall travel tips and texts.

Yeah, but he first up, we're going to talk about different places that you can go and the first up is going to be lost maple state natural area.

Now, this is famous for all the you've all the maples. Now, this comes off in mid November.

It's really the peak season for the color, the hiking, the camping and the stargazing.

And it's really Texas crown jewel for fall foliage because that's the time whenever people can go out there and there really does have a lot of reds and oranges and yellows.

Things that you think about that are more up in the north eastern part of the country, but this area in central Texas has a lot of that.

It's all fed by the Sabanau River and it's got cooler temperatures. So it's a really great place to go camping and hiking during the fall if you want to see all the color.

You know, I just can't I don't see colors in Texas in the fall. Maybe in January.

You know, summer is kind of dragon on here. It's not really letting things aren't cooling down like they're supposed to in the fall. You know, we don't have good fall anyway.

So David's going back to the UP in a few days and that's already starting to change up there. Yeah, he could get us some pictures. Yeah.

Yeah, moving on. Let's talk about the Texas Hill Country wine trail. Wow. Texas Hill Country. Now, if you go out in the fall, this means the harvest festivals.

They have great stomps going on in the wine trail from Fredericksburg all the way over to Johnson City. When you say that, all I can think of is that famous wine stomped that Lucy had on her shirt.

I actually got in the real fight with the actress that was playing the wine stomping lady. Well, yeah, that really didn't know that.

The fall is the harvest season in the Texas Hill Country wine world. And it's a really good time to go out and explore the wine trail because it's a lot cooler.

And it obviously runs from Fredericksburg to Johnson City. You used to nobody ever thought about Texas wines per se, other than you were making them in the backyard.

But there's actually a pretty big market for those. So during the fall, you get the Chris mornings and the mild afternoon so you can go out and do these walkthroughs of these wineries and do some wine tastings.

You get some award winning whites and reds, particularly the reds because that's supposed to be hard healthy. So take care of that.

Oh, yeah, let's go for that. They also host great stomps and harvest festivals. Some places have live music in October and November on the weekend.

So it's a great place to go out and check out the fall. Now, if you really want to get ambitious and you really want to get serious about going out and about in the fall, head down to the big band country.

Out west Texas because during the fall, the weather gets better. You go out there in the summer and it's like monster you'll melt down in the summer.

But during the fall and the winter time out there, when it's cool, you can go hiking, they've got river trips. And there's actually a lot of places you can go out there and do star gazing.

I've never been to these hills.

Oh, it's a beautiful place and it's monstrously big. I went one time in the summer and that was it. That's kind of like going to New Orleans in the summer. You learn, don't do that.

But it does make it into the fall makes it into a much more comfortable adventure destination. They've got places like the Chisels Basins, the Santa Elena Canyon and a lot of desert landscape.

If you're out in there, we're looking at the cactus and things that grow out in the desert. And you can actually get over to the Rio Grande. You can do some river rafting if you want to down through there.

And there's plenty of star gazing going on because a lot of people go out there during big bands international dark sky designation.

That's where the Milky Way is really gets brilliant that time of year and it really offers a fall offers a great time to do things like that.

Also, if you want to go back to the east, you can go over to Cato Lake. Now, this is a different. It's full of ball cypress trees that they're really old and they've been around a long time.

And it's me. Yes. Now, Cato Lake is one of those that's traveling the Texas Louisiana border. So during the fall, it's kind of got different. You can actually get different kind of elements of the fall going on because they've got a lot of cypress trees that got Spanish moss in them.

And it gets kind of swampy in certain areas when you get on the Louisiana side. They got kayaking. You can do you can go by canoe. They got guided boat tours.

This used to actually be the main waterway that brought ships and our ships boats came up bringing cargo up from the coast up until it kind of.

The silt and stuff little in and it's shallow out where they can't do that anymore, but it's a great place to go if you're looking for something out in the lake area in the east Texas.

Fall travel tips in Texas, Mr. Mars. Thank you so much. I hope I didn't cut you off, but the time is fast approaching that we need to take a break.

Yeah, I need to figure out how to get to where I can see the clock much better. Why did that not stop? I don't know, but at any rate.

When you're ready, Mr. Mars, it's time. Mr. Mars is now playing all the commercials. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's time now for the in-wheel time car talk show to take a quick break. We will and we'll be back right after this.

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Highway to Cybersecurity: Safeguarding Cars in the Digital Age

About this episode

Stellantis

General Motors

Ford Motor Company

cyber security

Jaguar Land Rover

ransomware attack

supply chain attack

CDK Global

fiberglass helmets

Nomex

computer-aided design (CAD)

Kevlar

carbon fiber

Chrysler Daytona

head-up display

Chevrolet Corvette

Gulf Coast Auto Shield

ceramic coating

paint protection film

radar detector

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