Smart charging stations for electronic cars are extremely vulnerable to hacking

Even though Tesla’s recent sales numbers painted a positive picture for the often beleaguered company, it’s still very early days for the electric vehicle market. The availability of EV charge points has been cited as a key obstacle in EV sales growth, but one researcher recently pointed to the newer generation of smarter charge points, meant to make EVs more attractive by offering features such as the ability to monitor or schedule charges via smartphone, or pay by touchless smart card, as also being a possible area of serious technical vulnerability. According to security analyst Ofer Shezaf, enterprising hackers could gain access to smart EV chargers and obtain access to logins, payments, hack into city or utility systems that run the chargers, or shut down parts of the networks themselves.