The cybersecurity landscape has deteriorated rapidly. According to Upstream Security's latest analysis, the automotive sector experienced 409 publicly reported cybersecurity incidents in 2024—a staggering 39% increase from the 295 incidents recorded in 2023. Even more concerning, massive-scale attacks impacting millions of vehicles jumped from just 5% of incidents in 2023 to 19% in 2024—a nearly four-fold increase that signals a fundamental shift in how cybercriminals are targeting our industry.
VicOne's 2025 Automotive Cybersecurity Report, released this past March, estimates that cyberattacks between 2022 and 2024 cost the industry tens of billions of dollars. This isn't theoretical risk anymore—it's real financial impact hitting bottom lines across the entire automotive ecosystem, from OEMs to suppliers to dealerships.
The Technical Reality: Rolling Supercomputers Under Attack
Modern vehicles have evolved into what the industry now calls software-defined vehicles (SDVs), containing over 100 million lines of code—with some projections suggesting this could reach 650 million lines by the end of 2025. To put this in perspective, that's more complex than most enterprise software systems running Fortune 500 companies.
The latest VicOne data reveals that 77% of automotive vulnerabilities are found within onboard systems—not in charging infrastructure or cloud platforms, but in the cars themselves. The infotainment system used to stream music could be the same pathway a hacker uses to access critical vehicle functions.
Criminal Sophistication: Organized Groups Target Automotive
We're no longer dealing with individual hackers. Organized criminal groups like Cactus, LockBit, Play, and 8Base are specifically targeting the automotive industry with significant resources and coordination. These groups have exploited vulnerabilities in VPN appliances and cloud platforms to disrupt OEMs, dealerships, and supply chains with devastating effect.
The Path Forward: Security by Design
As Max Cheng, CEO of VicOne, notes: "A proactive, multilayered approach to cybersecurity across all levels of the supply chain will help the automotive industry stay ahead of evolving threats and thrive in pursuing the unprecedented opportunities ahead."
The industry must embrace what experts call
Auto Agentic (www.autoagentic.ai) is an automotive intelligence company architecting how AI actually operates across dealership organizations.
Founded in 2024, Auto Agentic was created to solve a problem no vendor was addressing: automotive didn’t lack AI tools—it lacked intelligence architecture. As features multiplied, coordination worsened, insight fragmented, and transformation stalled.
Auto Agentic exists to change that.
We design agentic intelligence systems that unify operations, coordinate data and workflows, and enable organizations to move from fragmented automation to connected, predictive, and self-improving intelligence.
Our work is built on three foundations:
• the Automotive Intelligence Pyramid
• a coordinated agentic architecture of 75+ automotive-native agents
• and systematic transformation partnerships
Auto Agentic is SOC 2 Type II certified and trusted in regulated environments.
We don’t deliver tools. We build operating intelligence.
We partner with dealer groups and OEMs to architect how intelligence flows across their organizations—creating companies that coordinate rather than hand off, predict rather than react, and build advantages that compound over time.
