Where consumers see an advantage in cars that connect to the Internet for entertainment or use computers to parallel park, hackers see an opportunity.

In staged tests, hackers have shown that they can penetrate cars’ networks and cut the brakes ? or lock them up ? or even kill the engine.

While there are no publicly known instances of a car being commandeered outside staged tests, neither industry nor the government is waiting.

One Defense Department-funded program seeks to reconceive the most critical lines of computer code that control the car in a way that could make them invulnerable to major known threats. The model code would be distributed to automakers, who could adapt it to their needs.

(AP)