If you have a car that has lots of gadgetry and electronics system fitted to it and you happen to live in London, then you must really be concerned by the latest figures on car thefts. These figures show that nearly half of the 21,000 car thefts in London in 2013 were down to electronic hacking. These figures show that electronic car hacking was to blame for almost half of the vehicle thefts in London last year, the Metropolitan Police said.
In this new car crime wave thieves no longer have to smash a window or break a lock to steal a car, instead all they need is just 10 seconds to unlock a vehicle. There are gadgets available online which can fool the car into thinking a smart key is present or can be plugged directly into the ECU to create a blank key. The Metropolitan Police confirmed 47 per cent of the 21,000 thefts in the capital in 2013 were as a result of this method.
One can still combat these problems by installing a Thatcham-certified tracking system that works separately from the targeted ECUs and lets police track and recover the car. High-end expensive cars were mostly targeted by thieves last year and the average value of cars stolen and recovered was £40,000 in 2013 up £6,000 from the previous year.
“Car makers are very focused on addressing this issue and we know that progress has been made over the past two years.” said Mike Briggs, Thatcham’s security research manager.
Hackers could soon be using a homemade device called the CAN Haking Tool (CHT), the device has to be fitted to a car’s Controller Area Network (CAN) in order to work. It costs just £12 and the gadget is smaller than a mobile phone. The hackers can control things such as lights, locks, steering and brake, according to the creators.
This device works through a simple 60p computer chip outflanking an encryption on the car before reading and writing data from the flash memory on the car’s ECU. The tech company Harman warned at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, that an increasing number of cars are at risk from computer hackers because of the advanced Internet enabled systems they offer with the problem becoming life threatening.
