Looks like a Telsa owner caught on camera some thieves that tried to steal his Telsa Model S car by hacking the passive entry system. Telsa has some preventative controls developed to prevent this however the guy had not implemented them. For example, there’s a way to make the user put in a PIN number to activate the car to drive. Or there’s a way to use a “Faraday pouch” to store the fob, which would have prevented the thieves from nabbing the signals that he didn’t use either.
It comes down to if you lock the doors to your house but leave the windows open you will still be vulnerable to a thief. Telsa has come up with ways to lock your doors, your windows and every other entry point but the car owners need to implement them or this can happen.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/22/tesla-model-s-theft-keyfob-hack/
I have a questions…Is a key so inconvenient? Would a key ruin the Tesla cool factor? I do know this, NO ONE, NO ONE can copy your key like they can a key fob from outside of your house. I know this is hardly a fair comparison between the two technologies so diving deeper, locks can be picked and codes can be copied. I guess if I had to choose a two factor authentication would be best even for a hardware key. I suppose sine no hardware key only cars are likely to have a pin for ignition then Tesla’s car would be the most secure. This failed because the user did not configure properly. Its the issue with home routers, IoT and now cars.
Hi Sev
Thanks for sharing the information to us. It is dangerous that people capture the signal of the key.fob and steal the car. Sometimes, convenience things provide convenience for attackers to attack. The owner of the car should setup the PIN to start the car. There should be more controls to ensure authentication of drivers. The will remind Tesla to make the security controls stronger.
Hi Sev, very interesting topic. Hacking is always a kind of concern worried by all digital services. Tesla is a good example. Usually the company provides a series of methods to protect password away from hacking, however human is always the weakest part among those methods since sometimes people do not follow the rules due to all kinds of reasons including time, location and habits.