Amplifying Your Car Keyfob Lets Hackers Steal Your Car

Interesting article:

First, follow you into your favourite chic little boîte, wait for you to get nice and comfy at your favourite table, then walk over and…

Sit down…

Meanwhile, outside, another bad actor, with a similar lack of fanfare, walks up to the car that you’re absolutely sure you locked – you hit the lock button twice and the horn beeped, didn’t it? – and opens the door as if he was Ali Baba himself. He pushes the starter button – yes, the high-tech, anti-theft random-number-generating keyfob is still in your pocket – and faster than you can say “open sesame,” your fancy new Mercedes/BMW/Audi is on its way to a shipping container destined for Upper Slobovia.

Even the trick to this subterfuge – an “amplifier” that increases the output of your keyfob’s radio transmission that artful dodger No. 1 has in his pocket – isn’t particularly complicated, experts who know better than I saying they’re not much harder to construct than the little Heathkit ham radios we old farts used to put together when we were the avant garde of high-tech.

The only defense against such seemingly simple trickery is to construct something called “Faraday cage” – you know it as the proverbial tin foil hat every dime-store Hollywood director scripts into their “conspiracy theory” blockbuster – or keep your keyfob in something impervious to radio transmission like, say, the icebox in your refrigerator.

In the coming apocalypse stealing your car will be the least of your problems. Gaining access to the secure areas inside your car can allow all sorts of mischief to set up an attack later. Isoflurane stolen from a Veterinary hospital or bought from an overseas pharmacy online, mixed with DMSO bought over the counter, squirted onto your seat, could give you enough anethesia after sitting on it to make you a vulnerable target – to say nothing of the problem of people having access to the drive-by-wire system on your car, or the ability to install technical surveillance.