If your car does not bleep the second time you hit your wireless key to unlock your car, then you are in real trouble. What I mentioned earlier is a indicator of compromise. This indicator is for cars, yes, you are reading it right. Hackers have been investigating cars for the last couple of years and it seems that they have found various ways to hijack and control “new-age” cars.
In an earlier post, we showed how it was possible for two hackers to fully remotely control a car via the internet. The hackers which had hacked the car remotely had stopped the vehicle on the highway just to proof how dangerous it is to leave these vulnerabilities unfixed.
“Every garage that has a wireless remote, and virtually every car that has a wireless key can be broken into,” says Kamkar.
But now it seems that a new device has been crafted, this device is capable of unlocking any car which is vulnerable to the method used by the device. The device is called “RollJam” and it is actually a custom 32 dollar radio device.
By Wired:
RollJam, as Kamkar describes it, is meant to be hidden on or near a target vehicle or garage, where it lies in wait for an unsuspecting victim to use his or her key fob within radio range. The victim will notice only that his or her key fob doesn’t work on the first try. But after a second, successful button press locks or unlocks a car or garage door, the RollJam attacker can return at any time to retrieve the device, press a small button on it, and replay an intercepted code from the victim’s fob to open that car or garage again at will.
Now there is no immediate fix to this vulnerability, the only “fix” is not to use the wireless key option of your vehicle. Let’s see how this develops.