During the past six years, Volkswagen was cheating on the emissions testing for its diesel cars because the cars’ computers were able to detect when they were being tested, and temporarily alter how their engines worked so they looked much cleaner than they actually were and when they weren’t being tested, the car produced 40 times more the pollutants.

Computers allow people new ways to cheat, because the cheating is at the embedded software and the malicious actions only happen when the expected conditions are presented, otherwise continue with the normal operation mode. Because the software is “smart” in ways that normal objects are not, the cheating can be subtle and harder to detect.