WHAT A HEEL: The Ghost In The Machine
Here’s a shocker: Car dealers have as low an opinion of you as you do of them. To ensure that you keep making years of payments on an asset that starts depreciating before you even buy your first tank of gas, some dealers equip cars with a Web-based vehicle-immobilization system. If they make their car payments on time, customers would never know it’s there. But about 100 drivers in Austin, TX, found out about the device when they were unable to start their cars or to stop the horns from honking.
Omar Ramos-Lopez, 20, decided to get even with Texas Auto Center for firing him by hacking into Webtech Plus, the remote immobilization system that the dealer had installed on roughly 1,100 customers’ cars and disabling the vehicles, reports Wired:
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.
Ramos-Lopez has been charged with computer intrusion.
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