Hackers Attack 20 Million Accounts on Alibaba's Taobao Shopping Site

Hackers in China attempted to access over 20 million active accounts on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's Taobao e-commerce website using Alibaba's own cloud computing service, according to a state media report posted on the Internet regulator's website.

Analysts said the report from The Paper led to the price of Alibaba's U.S.-listed shares falling as much as 3.7 percent in late Wednesday trade.

An Alibaba spokesman on Thursday said the company detected the attack in "the first instance", reminded users to change passwords, and worked closely with the police investigation.

Chinese companies are grappling a sharp rise in the number of cyber-attacks, and cyber-securityexperts say firms have a long way to go before defences catch up to US counterparts.

In the latest case, hackers obtained a database of 99 million usernames and passwords from a number of websites, according to a separate report on a website managed by the Ministry of Public Security.

The hackers then used Alibaba's cloud computing platform to input the details into Taobao. Of the 99 million usernames, they found 20.59 million were also being used for Taobao accounts, the ministry website said.

The hackers started inputting the details into Taobao in mid-October and were discovered in November, at which time Alibaba immediately reported the case to police, the ministry website said. The hackers have since been caught, it said.

Alibaba's systems discovered and blocked the vast majority of log-in attempts, according to the ministry website.

The hackers used compromised accounts to fake orders on Taobao, a practice known as "brushing" in China and used to raise sellers' rankings, the newspaper said. The hackers also sold accounts to be used for fraud, it said.

Alibaba's spokesman said the hackers rented the cloud computing service, but declined to comment on security measures designed to stop the system being used for the attack. He said they could have used any such service, and that the attack was not aided by any possible loopholes in Alibaba's platform.

"Alibaba's system was never breached," the spokesman said.

The number of accounts, 20.59 million, represents about 1 out of every 20 annual active buyers on Alibaba's China retail marketplaces.

Password-Stealing 'Dorkbot' Worm Prowling Indian Cyberspace: CERT-In

Cyber-security sleuths have alerted Indian Internet users against the malicious activity of an online virus called 'dorkbot' which perpetrates itself through social networking sites and steals sensitive personal data and passwords of a user.

The malware, a variant of online virus and worm, has been specifically seen affecting operating systems running on Windows in the recent past.

"It has been observed that the variants of malware named as 'dorkbot' targeting windows operating systems, are spreading.

"The malware belongs to the family of worms having backdoor functionality and spreads through various vectors including drive-by-download attacks, social networking sites and compromised websites with browser exploits via removable drives in the form of auto-run exploits or by means of malicious links in instant messaging chats or Internet relay chats," a latest advisory issued by the Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) said.

The CERT-In is the nodal agency to combat hacking, phishing and to fortify security-related defences of the Indian Internet domain.

The deadly virus, with almost a dozen aliases, is capable of stealing sensitive information from infected machine including stored passwords, browser data, cookies and has a smart and lethal potential to take complete control of the affected system, it said.

The cyber-security agency said the malware can hide itself by over-writing, can collect system information such as OS (operating system) information, user privileges and apps installed on the system and can act to aid remote access of the infected machine to an attacker.

It destructs and infects a system by acquiring fake identities of Facebook, Skype or any other social media platform and lowers its immunity against a potential virus attack.

"To hide itself from detecting by anti-virus solutions, the malware injects its code into files like cmd.exe, ipconfig.exe, regedit.exe, regsvr32.exe, rundll32.exe, verclsid.exe and explorer.exe," the advisory said.

Oracle Settles FTC Charges That It Left Its Customers Open to Hacking

Oracle has settled allegations by the Federal Trade Commission that it failed to notify customers about unaddressed hacking dangers when it released security updates for the estimated 850 million US computers with Java SE software, the agency said on Monday.

The FTC alleged that Oracle promised consumers that its updates would make the software "safe and secure." In fact, the agency said, the updates removed some of the problematic software but left behind older versions of Java which were vulnerable to being hacked.

Oracle, which acquired Java in 2010 when it bought Sun Microsystems, Inc, declined comment on the settlement.

Under the terms of the settlement, Oracle is required to notify customers on Twitter or Facebook on how to remove the older software and to assist those who are updating their Java software remove older versions.

Oracle last week reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit, helped by strong sales from its cloud services.

Oracle, like other established tech companies, has been moving its business to the cloud-based model, essentially providing services remotely via data centres rather than selling installed software.

Revenue from company's cloud-computing software and platform service rose 34 percent to $484 million (roughly Rs. 3,208 crores) in the second quarter ended Nov. 30.

Total revenue fell 6.3 percent to $8.99 billion (roughly Rs. 59,601 crores), missing analysts average estimate of $9.06 billion (roughly Rs. 60,065 crores), according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Oracle's net income fell to $2.2 billion (roughly Rs. 14,585 crores), or 51 cents per share, from $2.5 billion (roughly Rs. 16,574 crores), or 56 cents per share, a year earlier.

Database of 191 Million US voters Exposed on Internet: Researcher

An independent computer security researcher uncovered a database of information on 191 million voters that is exposed on the open Internet due to an incorrectly configured database, he said on Monday.

The database includes names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations, phone numbers and emails of voters in all 50 US states and Washington, researcher Chris Vickery said in a phone interview.

Vickery, a tech support specialist from Austin, Texas, said he found the information while looking for information exposed on the Web in a bid to raise awareness of data leaks.

Vickery said he could not tell whether others had accessed the voter database, which took about a day to download.

While voter data is typically considered public information, it would be time-consuming and expensive to gather a database of all American voters. A trove of all US voter data could be valuable to criminals looking for lists of large numbers of targets for a variety of fraud schemes.

"The alarming part is that the information is so concentrated," Vickery said.

Vickery said he has not been able to identify who controls the database, but that he is working with US federal authorities to find the owner so they can remove it from public view. He declined to identify the agencies.

A representative with the Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to comment.

A representative with the US Federal Elections Commission, which regulates campaign financing, said the agency does not have jurisdiction over protecting voter records.

Regulations on protecting voter data vary from state to state, with many states imposing no restrictions. California, for example, requires that voter data be used for political purposes only and not be available to persons outside of the United States.

Privacy advocates said Vickery's findings were troubling.

"Privacy regulations are required so a person's political information can be kept private and safe," said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Digital Democracy. The leak was first reported by CSO Online and Databreaches.net, computer and privacy news sites that Vickery said helped him attempt to locate the database's owner.

CSO Online said the exposed information may have originally come from campaign software provider NationBuilder because the leak included data codes similar to those used by that firm.

In a statement, NationBuilder Chief Executive Officer Jim Gilliam said the database was not created by the Los Angeles-based company, but that some of its information may have come from data it freely supplies to political campaigns.

"From what we've seen, the voter information included is already publicly available from each state government, so no new or private information was released in this database," Gilliam said.

Microsoft To Warn Users When Governments Try To Hack Into Their Emails

WASHINGTON:  Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday that it will begin warning users of its consumer services including Outlook.com email when the company suspects that a government has been trying to hack into their accounts.

The policy change comes nine days after Reuters asked the company why it had decided not tell victims of a hacking campaign, discovered in 2011, that had targeted international leaders of China's Tibetan and Uighur minorities in particular.

According to two former employees of Microsoft, the company's own experts had concluded several years ago that Chinese authorities had been behind the campaign but the company did not pass on that information to users of its Hotmail service, which is now called Outlook.com.

In its statement, Microsoft said neither it nor the U.S. government could pinpoint the sources of the hacking attacks and that they didn't come from a single country.

The policy shift at the world's largest software company follows similar moves since October by Internet giants Facebook Inc, Twitter Inc and most recently Yahoo Inc.

Google Inc pioneered the practice in 2012 and said it now alerts tens of thousands of users every few months.

For two years, Microsoft has offered alerts about potential security breaches without specifying the likely suspect.

In a statement to Reuters, Microsoft said: "As the threat landscape has evolved our approach has too, and we'll now go beyond notification and guidance to specify if we reasonably believe the attacker is 'state-sponsored'."

In a blog post published late Wednesday, Microsoft said: "We're taking this additional step of specifically letting you know if we have evidence that the attacker may be 'state-sponsored' because it is likely that the attack could be more sophisticated or more sustained than attacks from cybercriminals and others.

The Hotmail attacks targeted diplomats, media workers, human rights lawyers, and others in sensitive positions inside China, according to the former employees.

Microsoft had told the targets to reset their passwords but did not tell them that they had been hacked. Five victims interviewed by Reuters said they had not taken the password reset as an indication of hacking.

Online free-speech activists and security experts have long called for more direct warnings, saying that they prompt behavioral changes from email users.

Password Hacks As Simple As 1-2-3-4-5-6

WASHINGTON:  Even after tens of millions of people had online accounts hacked, many Internet users still rely on easily guessed passwords.

A report released by the online security firm SplashData on Tuesday found the most commonly used by global Internet users were "123456" and "password" in 2015 - unchanged since 2011.

The fifth annual report by SplashData was compiled from more than two million leaked passwords during the year, and showed little change.

Despite the introduction of some new and longer passwords required by some websites, "the longer passwords are so simple as to make their extra length virtually worthless as a security measure," the company said in a blog post.

Among other top passwords were "12345678," "qwerty," "12345" and "123456789," according to the report.

Other popular password are based on standard keyboard patterns like "1qaz2wsx" (first two columns of main keys) or "qwertyuiop" (top row of keys) but are "based on simple patterns that would be easily guessable by hackers," SplashData said.

"We have seen an effort by many people to be more secure by adding characters to passwords, but if these longer passwords are based on simple patterns they will put you in just as much risk of having your identity stolen by hackers," said SplashData chief executive Morgan Slain.

"As we see on the list, using common sports and pop culture terms is also a bad idea. We hope that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will take steps to strengthen their passwords and, most importantly, use different passwords for different websites."

The epidemic of hacking has led some online companies to start moving away from passwords, and employing other verification methods such as biometrics.

Fingerprint readers have become more popular on mobile devices and other firms use face or iris recognition.

Some sites are moving to "two factor" authentication which require users to receive a code on a mobile device.

Israel's Cyber Sector Blooms In The Desert

BEERSHEBA, ISRAEL:  A modern metropolis rising from Israel's Negev desert stands on the frontline of a global war against hacking and cyber-crime, fulfilling an ambition of the country's founding father.

David Ben Gurion famously said he wanted to make the Negev bloom.

Today, in the streets of Beersheba, a city of 200,000, his dream is taking shape in a form he likely did not anticipate.

Long a poor relation of hyper-modern Tel Aviv, Beersheba has traditionally been a refuge for poor, working class and Sephardic Jews of Middle Eastern descent.

But the city in the vast Negev desert of southern Israel has experienced a rapid gentrification since the start of the decade, during which middle class neighbourhoods have expanded.

The real estate boom in Beersheba has been fuelled by the city's ambition to be Israel's cyber capital, especially since the creation of its industrial park CyberSpark.

Two ultra-modern complexes house a dozen Israeli companies, start-ups, venture capital funds and foreign groups such as Lockheed Martin, Deutsche Telekom, Oracle and IBM.

Already, 1,500 technicians, engineers and researchers are hard at work.

Many have been trained in the computer sciences department of the local Ben Gurion University part of a planned symbiosis between the university and the company, which are linked by pedestrian bridges.

"We have established a perfect ecosystem with the integration of Israeli companies and foreign multinationals, the university and the foundation of the Israeli army specialised in cybersecurity, which will move from the region of Tel Aviv to Beersheba," said Tom Ahi Dror, CyberSpark project leader at the Israeli National Cyber Bureau.

Starting From Scratch

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken highly of the development, saying the close proximity allows "a physical interaction between security officials, academia and industry, in Israel and abroad".

"They meet, they talk and they create together," he told a "CyberTech" conference in Tel Aviv, calling cyber security "vital" for a small country like Israel, which is faced with multiple threats and a favourite target of hackers.

According to a study carried out in 2012, Israel "may be the most heavily targeted country in the world, by hostile hackers, nonstate actors, and states, with as many as a thousand web attacks per minute".

Tal Elal, deputy mayor of the city, pinpoints the secret of CyberSpark's success: "We started from scratch four years ago and we designed a customised project to meet the exact needs of companies specialising in cybersecurity."

Two more complexes comprising 27 buildings are to be added, and the municipality expects the population to grow by 100,000 in the next 10 years.

About 30,000 soldiers, including 7,000 career officers, will move in the coming years to bases and a technology campus to be built on 100 hectares (250 acres) near CyberSpark and around Beersheba.

As a lure from the bustle of cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, the government plans a bonus of $18,000 for single officers and $50,000 for families who spend at least five years in Beersheba.

Cyber Security's Future

"We will do everything to integrate this population and avoid creating ghettoes where officers live, as has been the case in the past in other places," Elal said.

For the private sector, the government is also offering subsidies equivalent to 20 percent of salaries for three years to company employees who settled in Beersheba.

The state hopes to expand a sector which already has 250 companies of all sizes, Israeli and foreign, in the country.

Last year, the sector's exports reached a record $3.5 billion, according to government figures.

"Israel represents only 0.1 percent of the world's population but 20 percent of global investments (in cyber security)," said Dror.

"Cyber security has a very bright future," said Dudu Mimran, head of a Deutsche Telekom innovation laboratory based in Beersheba.

"It is an endless race in which hackers are always one step ahead because it is they who take the initiative," he added.

"And it is then up to us to respond to protect businesses, governments and individuals."

Israel's Cyber Sector Blooms In The Desert

BEERSHEBA, ISRAEL:  A modern metropolis rising from Israel's Negev desert stands on the frontline of a global war against hacking and cyber-crime, fulfilling an ambition of the country's founding father.

David Ben Gurion famously said he wanted to make the Negev bloom.

Today, in the streets of Beersheba, a city of 200,000, his dream is taking shape in a form he likely did not anticipate.

Long a poor relation of hyper-modern Tel Aviv, Beersheba has traditionally been a refuge for poor, working class and Sephardic Jews of Middle Eastern descent.

But the city in the vast Negev desert of southern Israel has experienced a rapid gentrification since the start of the decade, during which middle class neighbourhoods have expanded.

The real estate boom in Beersheba has been fuelled by the city's ambition to be Israel's cyber capital, especially since the creation of its industrial park CyberSpark.

Two ultra-modern complexes house a dozen Israeli companies, start-ups, venture capital funds and foreign groups such as Lockheed Martin, Deutsche Telekom, Oracle and IBM.

Already, 1,500 technicians, engineers and researchers are hard at work.

Many have been trained in the computer sciences department of the local Ben Gurion University part of a planned symbiosis between the university and the company, which are linked by pedestrian bridges.

"We have established a perfect ecosystem with the integration of Israeli companies and foreign multinationals, the university and the foundation of the Israeli army specialised in cybersecurity, which will move from the region of Tel Aviv to Beersheba," said Tom Ahi Dror, CyberSpark project leader at the Israeli National Cyber Bureau.

Starting From Scratch

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken highly of the development, saying the close proximity allows "a physical interaction between security officials, academia and industry, in Israel and abroad".

"They meet, they talk and they create together," he told a "CyberTech" conference in Tel Aviv, calling cyber security "vital" for a small country like Israel, which is faced with multiple threats and a favourite target of hackers.

According to a study carried out in 2012, Israel "may be the most heavily targeted country in the world, by hostile hackers, nonstate actors, and states, with as many as a thousand web attacks per minute".

Tal Elal, deputy mayor of the city, pinpoints the secret of CyberSpark's success: "We started from scratch four years ago and we designed a customised project to meet the exact needs of companies specialising in cybersecurity."

Two more complexes comprising 27 buildings are to be added, and the municipality expects the population to grow by 100,000 in the next 10 years.

About 30,000 soldiers, including 7,000 career officers, will move in the coming years to bases and a technology campus to be built on 100 hectares (250 acres) near CyberSpark and around Beersheba.

As a lure from the bustle of cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, the government plans a bonus of $18,000 for single officers and $50,000 for families who spend at least five years in Beersheba.

Cyber Security's Future

"We will do everything to integrate this population and avoid creating ghettoes where officers live, as has been the case in the past in other places," Elal said.

For the private sector, the government is also offering subsidies equivalent to 20 percent of salaries for three years to company employees who settled in Beersheba.

The state hopes to expand a sector which already has 250 companies of all sizes, Israeli and foreign, in the country.

Last year, the sector's exports reached a record $3.5 billion, according to government figures.

"Israel represents only 0.1 percent of the world's population but 20 percent of global investments (in cyber security)," said Dror.

"Cyber security has a very bright future," said Dudu Mimran, head of a Deutsche Telekom innovation laboratory based in Beersheba.

"It is an endless race in which hackers are always one step ahead because it is they who take the initiative," he added.

"And it is then up to us to respond to protect businesses, governments and individuals."

Israel's Cyber Sector Blooms In The Desert

BEERSHEBA, ISRAEL:  A modern metropolis rising from Israel's Negev desert stands on the frontline of a global war against hacking and cyber-crime, fulfilling an ambition of the country's founding father.

David Ben Gurion famously said he wanted to make the Negev bloom.

Today, in the streets of Beersheba, a city of 200,000, his dream is taking shape in a form he likely did not anticipate.

Long a poor relation of hyper-modern Tel Aviv, Beersheba has traditionally been a refuge for poor, working class and Sephardic Jews of Middle Eastern descent.

But the city in the vast Negev desert of southern Israel has experienced a rapid gentrification since the start of the decade, during which middle class neighbourhoods have expanded.

The real estate boom in Beersheba has been fuelled by the city's ambition to be Israel's cyber capital, especially since the creation of its industrial park CyberSpark.

Two ultra-modern complexes house a dozen Israeli companies, start-ups, venture capital funds and foreign groups such as Lockheed Martin, Deutsche Telekom, Oracle and IBM.

Already, 1,500 technicians, engineers and researchers are hard at work.

Many have been trained in the computer sciences department of the local Ben Gurion University part of a planned symbiosis between the university and the company, which are linked by pedestrian bridges.

"We have established a perfect ecosystem with the integration of Israeli companies and foreign multinationals, the university and the foundation of the Israeli army specialised in cybersecurity, which will move from the region of Tel Aviv to Beersheba," said Tom Ahi Dror, CyberSpark project leader at the Israeli National Cyber Bureau.

Starting From Scratch

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken highly of the development, saying the close proximity allows "a physical interaction between security officials, academia and industry, in Israel and abroad".

"They meet, they talk and they create together," he told a "CyberTech" conference in Tel Aviv, calling cyber security "vital" for a small country like Israel, which is faced with multiple threats and a favourite target of hackers.

According to a study carried out in 2012, Israel "may be the most heavily targeted country in the world, by hostile hackers, nonstate actors, and states, with as many as a thousand web attacks per minute".

Tal Elal, deputy mayor of the city, pinpoints the secret of CyberSpark's success: "We started from scratch four years ago and we designed a customised project to meet the exact needs of companies specialising in cybersecurity."

Two more complexes comprising 27 buildings are to be added, and the municipality expects the population to grow by 100,000 in the next 10 years.

About 30,000 soldiers, including 7,000 career officers, will move in the coming years to bases and a technology campus to be built on 100 hectares (250 acres) near CyberSpark and around Beersheba.

As a lure from the bustle of cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, the government plans a bonus of $18,000 for single officers and $50,000 for families who spend at least five years in Beersheba.

Cyber Security's Future

"We will do everything to integrate this population and avoid creating ghettoes where officers live, as has been the case in the past in other places," Elal said.

For the private sector, the government is also offering subsidies equivalent to 20 percent of salaries for three years to company employees who settled in Beersheba.

The state hopes to expand a sector which already has 250 companies of all sizes, Israeli and foreign, in the country.

Last year, the sector's exports reached a record $3.5 billion, according to government figures.

"Israel represents only 0.1 percent of the world's population but 20 percent of global investments (in cyber security)," said Dror.

"Cyber security has a very bright future," said Dudu Mimran, head of a Deutsche Telekom innovation laboratory based in Beersheba.

"It is an endless race in which hackers are always one step ahead because it is they who take the initiative," he added.

"And it is then up to us to respond to protect businesses, governments and individuals."

Israel's Cyber Sector Blooms In The Desert

BEERSHEBA, ISRAEL:  A modern metropolis rising from Israel's Negev desert stands on the frontline of a global war against hacking and cyber-crime, fulfilling an ambition of the country's founding father.

David Ben Gurion famously said he wanted to make the Negev bloom.

Today, in the streets of Beersheba, a city of 200,000, his dream is taking shape in a form he likely did not anticipate.

Long a poor relation of hyper-modern Tel Aviv, Beersheba has traditionally been a refuge for poor, working class and Sephardic Jews of Middle Eastern descent.

But the city in the vast Negev desert of southern Israel has experienced a rapid gentrification since the start of the decade, during which middle class neighbourhoods have expanded.

The real estate boom in Beersheba has been fuelled by the city's ambition to be Israel's cyber capital, especially since the creation of its industrial park CyberSpark.

Two ultra-modern complexes house a dozen Israeli companies, start-ups, venture capital funds and foreign groups such as Lockheed Martin, Deutsche Telekom, Oracle and IBM.

Already, 1,500 technicians, engineers and researchers are hard at work.

Many have been trained in the computer sciences department of the local Ben Gurion University part of a planned symbiosis between the university and the company, which are linked by pedestrian bridges.

"We have established a perfect ecosystem with the integration of Israeli companies and foreign multinationals, the university and the foundation of the Israeli army specialised in cybersecurity, which will move from the region of Tel Aviv to Beersheba," said Tom Ahi Dror, CyberSpark project leader at the Israeli National Cyber Bureau.

Starting From Scratch

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken highly of the development, saying the close proximity allows "a physical interaction between security officials, academia and industry, in Israel and abroad".

"They meet, they talk and they create together," he told a "CyberTech" conference in Tel Aviv, calling cyber security "vital" for a small country like Israel, which is faced with multiple threats and a favourite target of hackers.

According to a study carried out in 2012, Israel "may be the most heavily targeted country in the world, by hostile hackers, nonstate actors, and states, with as many as a thousand web attacks per minute".

Tal Elal, deputy mayor of the city, pinpoints the secret of CyberSpark's success: "We started from scratch four years ago and we designed a customised project to meet the exact needs of companies specialising in cybersecurity."

Two more complexes comprising 27 buildings are to be added, and the municipality expects the population to grow by 100,000 in the next 10 years.

About 30,000 soldiers, including 7,000 career officers, will move in the coming years to bases and a technology campus to be built on 100 hectares (250 acres) near CyberSpark and around Beersheba.

As a lure from the bustle of cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, the government plans a bonus of $18,000 for single officers and $50,000 for families who spend at least five years in Beersheba.

Cyber Security's Future

"We will do everything to integrate this population and avoid creating ghettoes where officers live, as has been the case in the past in other places," Elal said.

For the private sector, the government is also offering subsidies equivalent to 20 percent of salaries for three years to company employees who settled in Beersheba.

The state hopes to expand a sector which already has 250 companies of all sizes, Israeli and foreign, in the country.

Last year, the sector's exports reached a record $3.5 billion, according to government figures.

"Israel represents only 0.1 percent of the world's population but 20 percent of global investments (in cyber security)," said Dror.

"Cyber security has a very bright future," said Dudu Mimran, head of a Deutsche Telekom innovation laboratory based in Beersheba.

"It is an endless race in which hackers are always one step ahead because it is they who take the initiative," he added.

"And it is then up to us to respond to protect businesses, governments and individuals."

Self-Driving Car Technology Poses High Hacking Risk: Study

While major auto companies are working on introducing the futuristic self-driving technology in cars soon, this threatens to open new security problems for them as hackers have sensed an opportunity here, a researcher has predicted.

"We are a long way from securing the non-autonomous vehicles, let alone the autonomous ones," said Stefan Savage, computer science professor at the University of California-San Diago, in MIT Technology Review.

Pointing out security flaws to car companies which are into driverless car technology, the researcher said that extra computers, sensors and improved Internet connectivity required to make a car drive on its own increase the possible weak points.

Tech giant Google is working on autonomous cars as part of Google X project to develop technology for mainly electronic cars. The software installed in Google's cars is called Google Chauffeur.

Recently, with the help from Nasa space technology, automaker Nissan successfully test-drove its all-electric, driverless car at Nasa's Ames Research Centre in California.

Swedish automobile giant Volvo is also developing intelligent high bandwidth streaming capabilities in collaboration with Ericsson's cloud expertise and network to create a highway full of autonomous cars.

Tesla Motors, an American automotive and energy storage company, is also serious about self-driving car tech and hired processor design veteran Jim Keller to lead its autopilot hardware engineering team.

How does this technology work? The self-driving cars, or prototypes, rely on sensors to determine the surroundings and objects like pedestrians, cyclists and other vehicles around it.

The software assisting the sensors then decides the speed and trajectory to drive safely.

How is this technology a threat to security? Savage said that it is possible to take control of conventional vehicles in various ways, for example by dialling into a car's built-in cellular connection or by giving a driver a music CD that makes the car connect to an attacker's computer.

Once inside the system, the hackers can take control of the brakes, engine or other components of a person's car remotely.

The developers are still not able to isolate these "important" parts of the car because everything must be connected to enable many functions people expect of cars.

This is also owing to the fact that carmakers do not know exactly what software is inside the vehicles they sell because the third-party suppliers guard the details of the software inside, things like the brake-control system or central locking components.