By hacking into an Austin-based car dealership’s immobilization technology, used instead of repossessing cars, a disgruntled former employee of Austin-based car dealership Texas Auto Center disabled over 100 cars, sometimes setting their horns honking wildly, as well. The suspect, Oscar Ramos-Lopez, 20, has been arrested and charged with breach of computer security.
The technology in question is a system called Webtech Plus. Operated by Cleveland-based Pay Technologies, car dealers install a small black box under dashboards that responds to remote commands relayed over wireless pager network. While the system will not stop a vehicle that’s being driven, it can disable a car’s ignition system, or trigger the horn.
Texas Auto Center dealing with complaints in the last week of February. After Texas Auto Center reset its Webtech Plus passwords for all its employee accounts (5 days later), problems stopped. It turns out that Ramos-Lopez had (somehow) acquired another employees password to the system (his was obviously deactivated when he was terminated).
Texas Auto Center manager Martin Garcia said that Ramos-Lopez was good with computers. Apparently, he wasn’t all that knowledgeable, however, as it was easy, once police obtained access logs from Pay Technologies, to trace his IP address down.
According to Jim Krueger, co-owner of Pay Technologies, this is the first such incident is the company is aware of. “It was a fairly straightforward situation,” says Krueger. “He had retained a password, and what happened was he went in and created a little bit of havoc.”
Watch a video report from a local TV station:
