Japanese car manufacturer Nissan has announced that it is completely deactivating the smartphone companion app for its Leaf electric vehicle. The decision to disable the app was made after security researchers found out that hackers could take advantage of a loophole and use the app to remotely control the car.

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The app called NissanConnect EV allows Nissan Leaf owners to remotely charge their electric vehicles. The app also allows owners to control the air conditioning and heat of the car.

The security loophole on the NissanConnect EV app was discovered by Australian security researcher Troy Hunt. In a research conducted by Hunt, he was able to connect to a remote Nissan Leaf in the United Kingdom and was able to activate the car's temperature controls as well as pull up recent driving information stored on the car.

Hunt found out that in order to remotely control the car, he simply needed to know the specific vehicle identification number (VIN) of the car. Without the VIN, the hack will not work. While this might be a silver lining, Hunt discovered that the VIN on every Leaf car is the same except for the last five digits. This means that any hackers can simply provide five numbers to the end of a Leaf VIN and randomly hack any car somewhere in the world.

Hunt noted that the Leaf hack does not allow hackers to control any part of the car's driving mechanism. This thankfully eliminates the possibility of hackers forcing the car into an accident. However, Hunt added that hackers could use the exploit to drain the car's battery by repeatedly activating the air conditioner.

Hunt claims that he alerted Nissan about the security loophole but the company took no action. Nissan only took drastic actions and disable the app when Hunt's research started to garner attention.

Hunt told the BBC that, "Disabling the service was the right thing to do given it appears it's not something they can properly secure in an expeditious fashion."

Tagsnissan, Nissan Leaf, Nissan hack, Nissan Leaf hack, Nissan Leaf VIN, Leaf hack, Leaf VIN