Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.
The dealership used a system called Webtech Plus as an alternative to repossessing vehicles that haven’t been paid for. Operated by Cleveland-based Pay Technologies, the system lets car dealers install a small black box under vehicle dashboards that responds to commands issued through a central website, and relayed over a wireless pager network. The dealer can disable a car’s ignition system, or trigger the horn to begin honking, as a reminder that a payment is due. The system will not stop a running vehicle.
Texas Auto Center began fielding complaints from baffled customers the last week in February, many of whom wound up missing work, calling tow trucks or disconnecting their batteries to stop the honking. The troubles stopped five days later, when Texas Auto Center reset the Webtech Plus passwords for all its employee accounts, says Garcia. Then police obtained access logs from Pay Technologies, and traced the saboteur’s IP address to Ramos-Lopez’s AT&T internet service, according to a police affidavit filed in the case.
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I found this article shocking to me. It kind of made me think about how much we've come to rely on technology, and, something like this could happen even now... with all our security and technology.
We aren't really that much safer. There's nothing stopping a disgruntled employee from coming in and wrecking things for everyone else. I've had fears about us going all digital as a society in the past... and things like this kind of confirm my fear. I think it's great to have all of this technology... but there's always still a place for old things, like paper, and stuff like that. You shouldn't run have all your stuff on the web... a system like that just doesn't make sense.
www.wired.com
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