Tesla Model S stolen, as thieves block location tracking | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Model S stolen, as thieves block location tracking

bgr.com

17 pointsSonicSoul8 comments

>It’s believed that hackers were able to breach the owners’ Tesla accounts and then use iPhone or Android apps to access and drive the cars away.

So, now a compromised password could cost you a Tesla? Seems like the stakes are too damn high! What happened to the good 'ol days when they would at least need to manufacture (or procure) a dealer key to drive your car away?

>So, now a compromised password could cost you a Tesla? Seems like the stakes are too damn high! What happened to the good 'ol days when they would at least need to manufacture (or procure) a dealer key to drive your car away?

Still more effort and more rare than a screwdriver and a knife/wireclippers. Not that modern cars can be easily hotwired - but the "good 'ol days" definitely had a lower bar for theft...

A password is incredibly weak security. For someone who is safe it may be strong but for the average person a little social engineering can acquire it without their knowledge.

Most modern cars cannot be stolen with a screwdriver and a pair of wireclippers in a reasonable time frame. A password entry on the other hand would be seconds and any bystander who did see it would not notice anything out of the ordinary.

> Still more effort and more rare than a screwdriver and a knife/wireclippers. Not that modern cars can be easily hotwired - but the "good 'ol days" definitely had a lower bar for theft...

Hot-wiring required physical accesss and breaking one car at a time, here one bug can effect all cars. Fat-tails?

Wouldn't there be some sort of system effectively making these stolen cars worthless for anything but spare parts? Like for instance, a stolen phone not being able to be reactivated at a carrier.

I wonder if they did something like use a HackRF or BladeRF to spoof the GPS signal to make the car believe it hadn't moved?

GPS jammers are widely available, here's an article about a truck driver in New Jersey who got caught with one 3 years ago: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2013/08/man_fined_32000_for...

In the trucking industry, our telematics kept failing to the tuna can problem: A tuna can is the perfect size, shape, and material to cover a GPS antenna.

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