Disgruntled Ex-Auto Dealer Employee Hacks Computer System To Disable Over 100 Cars

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the welcome-to-the-new-world dept

Ah, the fun of the electronic age. A few years back we started hearing about tools to remotely disable a car. These were talked about as a security system to recover stolen vehicles, but also as a device to put on leased cars, in case they need to be repossessed. Of course, once you put that technology on the car, what’s to stop someone from abusing it? Turns out that a disgruntled ex-employee of a car dealership that put such a technology on its cars, was able to log into the computer system using a former co-workers account and then started methodically targeting the cars that used that system:

Ramos-Lopez?s account had been closed when he was terminated from Texas Auto Center in a workforce reduction last month, but he allegedly got in through another employee?s account, Garcia says. At first, the intruder targeted vehicles by searching on the names of specific customers. Then he discovered he could pull up a database of all 1,100 Auto Center customers whose cars were equipped with the device. He started going down the list in alphabetical order, vandalizing the records, disabling the cars and setting off the horns.

Good thing he wasn’t fired from a hospital that used internet-connected pacemakers, huh?

Filed Under: cars, computers, disabled, disgruntled employees