Hackers steal a Tesla Model S car by intercepting the signal from car’s key fob with a tablet to unlock and start the car.
The car was stolen by capturing its passive entry that used to automatically unlock the car when approached with the key.
Antony Kennedy who lives in Essex had the car only for nine months, the thieves steal the car parked in his driveway and he happens to see the thieves stealing the car through security cameras.
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He told Business Insider that, at 2 a.m. local time on Sunday, two men stole the Tesla Model S car that cost £45,000 ($58,000) by hacking into car’s key fob with a tablet.
Kennedy told Motherboard that he called Tesla first and Tesla said they can’t do anything as the car is offline. He admitted that he did not activate the Tesla’s PIN to Drive feature and the thieves removed the SIM card or blocked.
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He suggests other Tesla owners keep the key fob in a Faraday pouch that blocks signals, ensure the PIN to drive feature is enabled and to disable the passive entry feature.
@elonmusk My @tesla was stolen this morning, with just a tablet and a phone extending my fob range from the back of the house. I get that I should enabled PIN access. I wish it was harder for them to disable remote access though. I can’t track it or disable it.
— Antony Kennedy (not an Elon Musk parody) (@booshtukka) October 21, 2018
“But all of these things are like punishment for the owner. Passive entry is like magic. It’s one of the coolest things about the car—you walk up to it and the handles magically appear,” he said to Motherboard.
“We have issued several over-the-air updates to help protect our customers from thefts – last year we introduced an update that allows all customers to turn off passive entry entirely, and this year we introduced PIN to Drive, which allows customers to set a unique PIN that needs to be entered before their vehicle is driven.” tesla Spokesperson said to Business Insider.
