Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have been working for the last year to show that your car is not just metal and glass but contains a network of computers that can be hacked. The pair, one a security engineer at Twitter and the other director of security intelligence at the Seattle consultancy IOActive, received over $80,000 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in support. Miller and Valasek were tasked with finding the “security vulnerabilities” in cars.

The attack software they developed, as well as their findings, will be released at the hacker conference Defcon in Las Vegas in August. They hope their software and their findings will assist researchers to “find and fix” security problems before hackers find the security weaknesses in the cars first.

According to Valasek, accessing a car’s computer has been done and the pair are seeking to show what the hackers can do when they have gained that access. Watch Andy Greenberg, a Forbes writer experience just what can be done.

[Source: Forbes, YouTube]