Sergiu Zaharia, Deloitte Romania: “The automotive industry will be the primary target for hackers in the future”

“People have high expectations from the automotive industry because it combines numerous technologies like AI and 5G to make clients happy. Autonomous driving of the future may not be as autonomous as we want, because some people might interfere with our experience. I’m talking about hackers or cybercriminals.

In the last years we have seen a strong hackers displacement, meaning cybercriminals are moving now from the financial sector to the automotive industry. It’s not yet the most targeted sector, but the automotive industry will be the primary target for hackers in the future,” Sergiu Zaharia, Director of Cyber Strategy Advisory, Deloitte Romania said during Romanian Automotive Forum 2022 organized by Automotive Today and The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“There are several opportunities for hackers: highest data in transit, highest software surface, huge supply chain, less secure enterprise.

Some statistics show that 85 percent of the attacks are executed remotely toward the vehicles.

50 percent of the attacks on the vehicles and manufacturing happened in the last two years, so now we have an exponential growth of these attacks.

A fully connected autonomous vehicle has tens of thousands of vulnerabilities, which means a great attack surface for the hackers.

If we compare the automotive industry with the finance industry, the automotive players are less prepared at enterprise level because they are not targeted like the banks and financial institutions.

The automotive sector should be soon ready to face the cyber darkness. The finance sector has been there, but now they see the light as they are not the primary target for hackers anymore.

Cyber research is critical for automotive players to filter most of the cyber-attacks.

The European Cybersecurity Competence Centre has been established in Bucharest since last year and is almost operational. They will manage a research budget of around 4 billion Euro, and they are welcoming projects from the private sector to be sponsored with European money.”

Full recording of the conference: