A 14-year-old boy at a five-day "car-hacking threats" summer camp made a gadget from parts purchased at RadioShack to remotely infiltrate a connected car.

With some help from the assembled experts, he was supposed to attempt a remote infiltration of a car, a process that some of the nation's top security experts say can take weeks or months of intricate planning. The student, though, eschewed any guidance. One night, he went to Radio Shack, spent $15 on parts and stayed up late into the night building his own circuit board.

The next morning, he used his homemade device to hack into the car of a major automaker. Camp leaders and automaker representatives were dumbfounded. "They said, 'There's no way he should be able to do that,'" Brown said Tuesday, recounting the previously undisclosed incident at a seminar on the industry's readiness to handle cyber threats. "It was mind-blowing."