Tag Archive for: Thieves
How car thieves can hack your ride with new apps
/in Internet Security
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Stolen cars are a major crime in Memphis, and new technology may make you an easy victim.
As more cars are now connected to the internet and even have remote locking and starting features that can be activated via a key fob or an app, thieves have caught on.
Joshua Harvey loves cars, especially the Dodge Charger he got last year. That is, until one early morning last October.
“I was watching TV, getting ready for work, and I heard a noise outside and I wasn’t really sure what it was,” he said. “Then I heard sounds like my car was cranked, just the pipes went up. I went grab my keys and I went outside to see what’s going on, and the car was gone.”
He jumped in his wife’s car and tried to go after the car thieves.
He never caught up with them. Neither could police, who he says were already in the area.
Harvey says his car was locked. He had the keys and no glass was broken — so how did they get in the car?
“That’s what the police told me they probably had a programmer, where they were able to just drive off with it,” he said.
Apps can open doors without breaking windows
Bennie Cobb, a retired Shelby County Sheriff’s captain who owns Eagle Eye Security, said the thieves likely used a programmer or an app.
“They just get the VIN number from a program app and I guess, at that point, they were just able to crank the car and drive off,” he said. “We are in a new era today.”
Cobb said, whenever you don’t use a physical key, you open yourself up for hacking.
“With the era of electronics, the ability to defeat the lock without breaking the window or setting off the alarm with these smart phones and these other devices, it’s increasing, and it is going to continue to increase until the auto manufacturers or Congress can come up with something to prevent the lock from being defeated,” Cobb said.
Here are some things you can do
Steering wheel locks will slow a thief down. So will using the car’s inside door lock instead of a fob to lock your…
Cyber thieves target local, county governments to launch bigger attacks
/in Computer Security
Lindsay M. McCoy
When Webster Township in Washtenaw County was attacked by ransomware, officials had to create a new website, new emails and new anti-virus and ransomware software to resolve the problem.
It was one of 77 ransomware attacks in the United States last year that were confirmed by the cybersecurity company, Emsisoft.
To lessen such attacks, the federal government has included a new $1 billion cybersecurity grant program in the bipartisan infrastructure law passed last year. It allocates the bulk of the funding that states receive for their local governments, with 25% of the money earmarked for rural governments.
Sgt. Matt McLalin, who investigates cyberattacks in the State Police’s cyber command center, said local and county governments make up a lot of the center’s victims.
“Every single week we are getting multiple reports of local governments who have been affected,” McLalin said.
Brett Callow, a threat analyst from Emsisoft, said the discrepancy in data stems from not all attacks being reported to his New Zealand-based company or being labeled as “cyberattacks” rather than ransomware.
“Tracking incidents is far more challenging than it should be,” Callow said.
The most common type of attacks on rural governments are ransomware attacks and phishing emails, said Michigan Tech University professor Yu Cai, a cybersecurity expert.
“The ransomware is getting explosive in the past 10 years, so we see a lot of cyberattacks based off ransomware,” he said.
When ransomware infiltrates a computer system, those impacted can’t access their information systems until they pay ransom to the hackers, usually in the form of bitcoin, according to Cai.
Rural governments often become targets of such attacks because of their lack of expertise or resources to defend themselves, he said.
“Small towns, rural areas, they can’t even afford an IT person, let alone a security person, so they are an easy target,” Cai said.
A less obvious reason why rural and other small governments are often targeted is because they can be used as gateways to larger attacks, he said.
“A lot of small towns think, ‘Well, we don’t have a lot of valuable information in our computer…
STALLARD: A curse on the hackers, slackers and thieves
/in Computer Security
Way back in the ’80s, I spent a Saturday playing in a softball tournament in California. I was stationed on a Marine Corps base, and occasionally we’d get time to …