Now here’s a delightful story. A gentleman in Austin, Texas was laid off from his job as a car mechanic. The thing is, he was “pretty good with computers.” So, in order to get petty revenge on his former employers, he used a system to remotely disable more than 100 cars. Fun!
The man, one Omar Ramos-Lopez, 20, didn’t take kindly to behind laid off. Hey, it’s tough out there, so I can understand that he’d be upset. The shop where he worked used a system that can be used to remotely disable the ignition system or cause the horn to honk uncontrollably. (It can’t be used to disable an already on car.) So, activate the system!
And he did, causing the cars to either not start or, more hilariously, honk until the battery was removed.
The system used a Web interface to remotely control the cars. Its original, non-prank intention was to kindly remind people to make their car payments.
Police were able to trace the “attacks” to Ramos-Lopez by examining the site’s logs. The logs pointed right to his IP address.
You’d think he’d at least run the attacks through a proxy server or whatever…