Being an ex-hacker and current security journalist, I tend to write quite a lot about hacking. Not being Jeremy Clarkson, this doesn’t usually involve cars. Until now that is.

A report from the combined brain cells of research boffins at the University of California San Diego and University of Washington suggests that your car, like your computer, could fall victim to hackers.

Your car maybe, but not mine. This has nothing to do with me installing all sorts of counter-hacking measures, turning my vehicle into something resembling that which might be driven by your average Bond villain. It has everything to do with my car being 10 years old and so not incorporating some snazzy fly-by-wire control system, or having any notion of wireless control beyond the remote door locking and alarm blipper thingy. Oh, and the chances of anyone wanting to ‘hack’ my car being about as remote as anyone wanting to hack my Xbox. Seriously, why would anyone want to be able to fiddle with my aircon or even disable my brakes for that matter. My wife, who would obviously be the prime suspect, knows nothing about electronics, cars or hacking.

Currently, it would appear that in order to take control of your cars computers and disable your brakes or open and shut the doors, the hackers have to get inside and sit down with a laptop attached through the dashboard to gain access to the necessary systems. The researchers are warning, however, that it will become easier as more and more cares roll off the production line with more and more wireless connectivity as standard. Of course, this still doesn’t address the likelihood of anyone wanting to hack your car unless you are some high profile target in which case I imagine security measures will have been implemented to prevent it from the get go.

Yet some security experts are taking this whole car hacking thing much more seriously than I would have imagined. “It’s interesting to see that the researchers have identified that most cars built since the late 1990s have a computer diagnostic port, since this port needs direct physical access to operate and therefore hack” insists Barmak Meftah, Fortify Software’s chief products officer who goes on to add “now these systems are being wirelessly enabled and held together with several tens of megabytes of code, it’s a relatively small step to modify the code and allow hackers an easy – and wireless – back door into a car’s computer system.”

The work that those researchers have done means that, in theory, “this will eventually allow a wireless drive-by attack on the firmware of a car” Meftah warns and that will lead to professional thieves being able to walk up and steal any car they like pretty much. “It’s all very well saying that the manufacturers should enhance the security of their car computer networks and the protocols used, but this potential fiasco could be have been avoided if car developers had built security in from the ground up on a vehicle’s electronics systems” he says.

You know what, I have a sneaking suspicion that by the time car thieves are actually able to steal cars in this way the manufacturers will, indeed, have come up with counter-measures to prevent it. Either that or they will happily watch their business sink without trace under the publicity of their cars being stolen by geeks.

Meanwhile, I shall focus my attention back to the enterprise and worry about what the real geek villains are up right now, rather than worrying about what they might be doing to the car of the future.