New remote unlock hack compounds VW's problems

Has it ever been a bad year for Volkswagen! The German automaker is still dealing with the fallout of having duped thousands of customers with cars that weren’t as clean as they said they were, now we learn that a relatively simple hack makes it easy to break into most VW vehicles manufactured since 1995. The news comes out of the Usenix security conference in Austin Texas, where University of Birmingham researcher Flavio Garcia and his team say they figured out how to remotely unlock nearly 100 million Volkswagen’s using some clever reverse engineering and a cheap radio scanner connected to a laptop. It was apparently tedious work, but relatively easy. And the worst part is, once they figured out the VW hack they were able to create a second one that works to unlock millions of other vehicles made by Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Ford, Citroen, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Opel and Peugeot. What’s worse is that the semiconductor company that makes the chips used in these keyless entry systems has been recommending that its customers use newer algorithms for years. Ok, that’s really bad … so what is VW going to do about it now? Well, we just don’t know. VW has acknowledged the vulnerability, but that’s all. In the meantime, if you own a VW made since ‘95, it’s probably the safest bet that you not leave valuables in your car – which you shouldn’t do anyway. And if you’re really concerned, you can always replace the factory security system with an aftermarket unit for a few hundred dollars. You can now catch DT Daily on Facebook Live! https://facebook.com/digitaltrendsftw/videos/10154438263831133/ SUBSCRIBE FOR THE LATEST VIDEOS http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=DigitalTrends VISIT DIGITAL TRENDS http://www.digitaltrends.com/ CHECK OUT OUR LATEST PODCAST http://www.digitaltrends.com/podcasts/ FOLLOW US! https://www.facebook.com/digitaltrendsftw https://twitter.com/digitaltrends https://www.instagram.com/digitaltrends https://plus.google.com/+digitaltrends/posts