Watch out for cracker hijacks

Abstract

Think PCs are the only targets for malicious hackers? It's time for embedded systems designers to worry about security. It's tough to hack an 8bit microcontroller running code out of mask ROM. Short of getting it to run data as code, the cracker - industry slang for a hacker with malicious intent s out of luck. But embedded systems are becoming more vulnerable to attack for a variety of reasons. In many cases, embedded systems are effectively personal computers in miniature. They have mass storage organised as file systems. That mass storage is solid state rather than a spinning disk in most cases. But, at the software level those differences are minor.