2 Million Cars with Anti-Theft Systems Installed by Dealers are at Higher Risk of Theft

Before y'all get the pitchforks out and exclaim this has nothing to do with Seattle, it does and let me tell you why.

After hearing about this vulnerability a couple weeks ago I wanted to see if I could find the flaw and recreate the researchers' findings, they are going to be disclosing the details this week at DefCon, and after a few days of research I was able to verify this is indeed real and there are vulnerable vehicles in the Seattle area.

The worse part about this is that some people are completely in the dark about this issue, because even if you don't pay the up-charge to "activate" the system it remains installed and still "active", just not to the vehicle owner :(. The linked article provides details for how someone can go about updating the system that should address this flaw.

I'm posting this in the hopes of getting the word out before this gets into the hands of the wrong individuals, and I'd be naive to think that someone else has not already figured it out. I'd post this on reddit to get some more exposure but alas those privileges have been revoked for the time being, so please feel free to spread the word there if you so desire.

P.S. I developed an Android application that can scan and detect these devices out in the wild. It does not contain the exploit, cannot connect to or control these systems and only scans the airwaves for their broadcasts. https://github.com/0xD34D/KARR_Scan