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from the but-they-still-steal-the-contents dept.
The NYT reports that in 1990, New York City had 147,000 reported auto thefts, one for every 50 residents but last year, there were just 7,400, or one per 1,100 for a 96 percent drop in the rate of car theft. There's been a big shift in the economics of auto theft: Stealing cars is harder than it used to be, less lucrative and more likely to land you in jail. As such, people have found other things to do. The most important factor is a technological advance: engine immobilizer systems, adopted by manufacturers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These make it essentially impossible to start a car without the ignition key, which contains a microchip uniquely programmed by the dealer to match the car. "It's very difficult; not just your average perpetrator on the street is going to be able to steal those cars," says Capt. John Boller, who leads the New York Police Department's auto crime division. Instead, criminals have stuck to stealing older cars.
Now a startup in Chile is working on an unstealable bike by making a lock out of the frame. The only way to steal it is to break the lock, which implies breaking the bike. Or you could try painting your bicycle pink.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 13 2014, @09:48AM
All you really need to do is get the trunk popped, pretend you're putting stuff in it, get access to a can-bus line in the trunk, wire your doodad into it, and presto you've now got network access to some shiny expensive car.
There are a couple catches here: if the car has motion sensors that would trigger the alarm, if there's a trunk latch trigger, if the unlock circuit and the ignition use different authorization mechanisms. Fundamentally however, wireless access can get you into the car and even if the ignition system is too secure to crack wherever you plan to steal it getting yourself physical access to the car's network is often enough to either bypass the immobilizer or reflash the pcm to ignore it.)
I doubt anyone serious about stealing a current-generation high-line car doesn't use access to one to disassemble it to find exploits. Alternately they could use an auto shop's electronic service manual to map out possible weak spots, although this would put you at higher risk of failure since you haven't had a hands-on opportunity to see what will or won't trigger the alarm/immobilizer/tracking in a 'real' situation.
(Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday August 13 2014, @01:35PM
If the mirrors have CAN I/O for positioning them then the mirror can be popped out and the CAN bus accessed.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 13 2014, @11:11PM
It's possible they don't. I'm pretty sure my Volvo does not use CAN for the mirrors, but instead uses the simpler and much slower LIN bus [wikipedia.org]. CAN is used for higher-performance applications in the car.