The Night the Horn Sounded - Cyber Security Around 2010

The Night the Horn Sounded - Cyber Security Around 2010

Around 2010, the United States was in a period of economic uncertainty in the aftermath of the Lehman Shock and the rapid penetration of Internet technology. Management via the Internet was brought into the field of used car sales, and small devices that remotely shut off the engine or honk the horn to warn the driver if payment was overdue began to spread. Texas Auto Center introduced a wireless-controllable black box and installed it in more than a hundred cars, but in February 2010, even the cars of customers who were not behind in their payments suddenly stopped running, causing an unusual situation in which horns were sounded throughout the city. The noise in the middle of the night prompted the police to be dispatched, and over a hundred customers who had lost their means of transportation were unable to go to work, causing chaos. At first, it was thought to be a mechanical malfunction, but in fact, Omar Ramos Lopez, a young, laid-off collections clerk, had exploited hi
s inside knowledge and the password of an old colleague to break into the system. He even went as far as to maliciously rewrite customer information with celebrity names such as "Jennifer Lopez". The incident highlights the security vulnerabilities of the early days of the IoT and the reality of insider threats: technologies such as OBD standards and wireless telematics have brought convenience, but have also transformed the car from a mere machine into a computerized target, Metcalfe's Law's expansion of network value promised the future, but it also meant an exponential expansion of the attack surface. The spectacle of a city paralyzed from the fingertips of the web was a true demonstration of how the challenges of cybersecurity can shake the entire society.