One of the more popular items at Texas Auto Center, a car dealership in Austin, Texas, is an anti-theft GPS system that enables police and users to disable a stolen car’s engine in the event of a theft. The car gets stolen, cops turn it off, and then they use the GPS to track it down. If the car is hidden, this unit even honks the horn so police can discover its hiding place. Well, a disgruntled employee, 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, used this system for evil, instead of good. Police accuse him of vandalizing more than 100 cars via the Internet.
Apparently, Ramos-Lopez hacked into the company’s computer system and was able to access the system that controlled those GPS units and, from home, shut them off or forced the horns to honk, seemingly at random. While hacked in, he also changed company records to show that dead rapper Tupac Shakur bought a car in 2009 and ordered $130,000 worth of merchandise from the company’s GPS unit supplier. Nobody really knows why he decided to sabotage those cars deliberately.
The last thing you want to do is make a geek mad; they know how to get back at you in the worst possible ways.
Image: Cheldo
Tags: Omar Ramos-Lopez, vandalism, Texas Auto Center, disgruntled employee, car vandalism, man vandalizes 100 cars over the Internet, cyber security, cyberterrorism, cybervandalism, Austin, Texas, man disables cars via online attack, man turns engines off and honks horns via Internet