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EmptyTimCup
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another reason not to buy a new car / car from a Stealership
Hacker Disables More Than 100 Cars Remotely
# By Kevin Poulsen Email Author
# March 17, 2010 |
More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.
Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.
“We initially dismissed it as mechanical failure,” says Texas Auto Center manager Martin Garcia. “We started having a rash of up to a hundred customers at one time complaining. Some customers complained of the horns going off in the middle of the night. The only option they had was to remove the battery.”
The dealership used a system called Webtech Plus as an alternative to repossessing vehicles that haven’t been paid for. Operated by Cleveland-based Pay Technologies, the system lets car dealers install a small black box under vehicle dashboards that responds to commands issued through a central website, and relayed over a wireless pager network. The dealer can disable a car’s ignition system, or trigger the horn to begin honking, as a reminder that a payment is due. The system will not stop a running vehicle.
Texas Auto Center began fielding complaints from baffled customers the last week in February, many of whom wound up missing work, calling tow trucks or disconnecting their batteries to stop the honking. The troubles stopped five days later, when Texas Auto Center reset the Webtech Plus passwords for all its employee accounts, says Garcia. Then police obtained access logs from Pay Technologies, and traced the saboteur’s IP address to Ramos-Lopez’s AT&T internet service, according to a police affidavit filed in the case.
how Onstar does it
In the early morning of October 18, Jose Ruiz was carjacked at gunpoint. Flagging down a passing police car, Ruiz notified them that his 2009 Chevy Tahoe was equipped with OnStar®. OnStar was immediately able to pinpoint the vehicle's exact GPS location, and once officers spotted it, they requested that OnStar use its Stolen Vehicle Slowdown® technology to bring it to a stop. Ruiz had his Tahoe back without a scratch 16 minutes after OnStar was called, and the suspect was safely apprehended.
Millions of vehicles are stolen each year, often resulting in high-speed chases that put innocent lives and property at risk. Available on select OnStar-equipped 2009 model year and newer vehicles, Stolen Vehicle Slowdown is an industry-exclusive breakthrough that could change all that. Welcome to a new age of stolen vehicle recovery.
do you really know what is being installed in your vehicle these days
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