4 ways car thieves follow, and ways to prevent car theft

It’s the worst nightmare any car owner can have, so here are the ways most car thieves do their business, how you can protect against them, and ways to prevent car theft.

There certainly can be no worse feeling than having your car stolen. You poured your blood and sweat and tons of money saved from your small income to be happy with this car, and yet someone thinks they have the right to take it from you in an act of criminal maliciousness. With the huge demand for used spare parts – especially in the luxury car sector – cars are being stolen at an alarming rate, with car thieves cutting them up and turning them into parts that are sold online.

Sometimes entire cars are also shipped to faraway countries as jurisdiction is somewhat limited and once the car is out of your home country it is impossible to get it back. For example, Eastern Europe has become a hotspot for stolen luxury SUVs such as Range Rovers and BMW X5s, and due to their nature and ability to traverse rough terrain perfectly, they cross the difficult roads in places like Albania and Bulgaria.

Suffice it to tell you that every 43 seconds there is a car theft in the United States , how do these criminals go about their business? This is what we answer and learn together how to prevent car thieves from stealing the car.

OBD port hack

The OBD (On-Board Vehicle Diagnostics) port is used by technicians to investigate vehicle diagnostics, and to find the source of any warning lights displayed by the vehicle’s computers. And OBD encoders can be connected to control vehicle functions. Alarms can also be disabled through this port, and car thieves can open doors, start engines within seconds by simply plugging in an encoder, and simulate entering a key into the car’s engine.

OBD ports must be easily accessible by law so that competing car companies can check the on-board systems, and with freely available ciphers online to simulate a key and reprogram the car’s security settings, a thief can start and move the car in just 15 seconds .

With keyless entry becoming more and more popular day by day, criminals have acquired this convenient form of entry to devastating effect. Routine equipment used by workshops and specialists to encrypt keyless entry was quickly wiped out by criminals and is now being used to maliciously reprogram keys. You can review it in the next video.

And key programmers can be simple portable devices that plug into OBD and can quickly work on coding a new fob. Once entered with a newly programmed key, all the thief has to do is press the start/stop button to take it and go away.

Both of these hacking methods are facilitated by owners who place their key holder near the window or near where the car is parked. By using simple devices that can transmit a frequency to block the signal sent from your key to lock the car while you are away from it, thieves can intercept the signal. With the key cloned they can then walk and drive the car away.

To make this more clear, while you lock the car through the remote control or key, car thieves pick up the signal via a laptop computer, and identify it, and when you move away from the car, it generates the same signal from the computer, so it simply opens the car door and starts it and takes off.

To protect against this type of hacking, OBD locks can be purchased to deter any form of physical contact with the port. As technology and encryption within cars grow at an exponential rate, it is advisable to make sure all onboard electronic systems are up-to-date, as vital security software updates will be added through the search to keep any intruders out of trouble, as often as in laptops and phones.

manual theft

In older cars that don’t have a keyless entry or perhaps no central locking at all, thieves have a much easier time. Using a tool known as “Skinny Jim”, which is a set of hooks and wires that can be used to slide to the bottom of the window, and through the closed window, the wire enters down into the locking system inside the door. Car thieves make quick vibrations and pull on the lock to watch it flip to the open position of the door, allowing the thief to get into the car and start tampering with the car’s electronics.

Another method involves hammering a screwdriver into the locking mechanism so the door can be opened.

With the wiring diagrams that make up a vehicle’s ignition system found in online databases, anyone can find the right color of wire to cut and install a vehicle’s hot wire. By clipping the power wires under the steering wheel and twisting the terminals together, a complete circuit is formed which will start controlling the fuel pump and control the first cycle of the ignition. By cutting and stripping the wires on both sides of the ignition lock, they can be touched to send current through the starter motor to start the vehicle.

Auto thieves can even start many older cars with shabby ignition chambers by hammering with a flat-headed screwdriver, simulating a key allowing the engine to be started through normal ignition.

Car thieves and burglary

The English police found through UK car theft data that the most common form of car theft is through simple break and entry. It seems that the majority of car owners leave their keys in the most convenient places for car thieves, believing that the risk of burglary is very low. In 2015 alone, 90,000 cars were stolen in the UK, the vast majority of them being thieves known as cat thieves who enter homes through a window and pick up keys from the office, hall table or dining table.

So these thieves are completely dependent on the target owners who do not bother to put the car keys in a safe place, and overnight you may not find your car. If your car is particularly valuable, you probably don’t want the keys: there have been burglaries where car thieves used force when breaking and entering to find the keys.

And please be aware that even placing your keys in crowded places such as restaurants or cafes can make life very easy for small car thieves there, and leaving the keys in your car while you are shopping in stores is a fundamental sin of car ownership.

Auto theft of the future – full car hacking?

It is now possible to hack a vehicle’s CAN bus system using a laptop computer, a satellite, and a circuit board. An in-vehicle CAN transmission system is a collection of all the computers in the vehicle where they can all talk to each other and interact to provide every function the vehicle needs to transmit.

With the initial breakthrough previously accomplished only with a physical connection between a laptop computer, the OBD bus system, and CAN, programmers are now able to send wireless commands via satellite to vehicles miles away, sending a frightening reminder to manufacturers about the need to act quickly to develop protection systems.

With features like self-driving now standard on high-end luxury cars, manufacturers like Tesla will have to do well before any criminals out there to secure the new convenience technology from any malicious patching. Imagine if car thieves could get access to your car’s self-driving function, set some GPS coordinates and let you watch them from your bedroom window while your hackable Tesla Model X drives away silently, standing idly by and watching your car steal from you with no thieves in front of you.

Although car theft is declining as on-board systems become more complex and therefore more expensive to hack, hundreds of thousands of cars are stolen in the United States each year. Many of these robberies can be avoided using blatantly obvious, but often overlooked methods that could one day save your car from being attacked by some opportunistic thief known as Cretin.

The solution is simply not to leave the keys near the windows, and this greatly reduces the risk that someone will decide that your car is worth stealing and reach out the window and get the job done. You can also review the comprehensive encyclopedia of tips to maintain your car from Mallaky.com.

Also, a simple garage service and making sure your car does an annual MOT’d test, which is a test that all vehicles over three years old must pass every year to prove it’s safe to drive . From gaining access to the OBD port and updating and improving any security systems on your vehicle, making hacking a little more difficult for any technology-dependent thieves. And other obvious things like leaving your car in a well-lit and fully enclosed area is a must if you value your car, don’t go too far simple solutions also provided by immobilizers and wheel locks are an extra barrier from any unwanted movement of your car.

Has your car ever been stolen or are you taking extra precautions to make sure your car is not immunized? Comment below explaining how you are protecting your vehicle.