Want to Pay a Lot for ...Insecurity? Get a Toyota Prius!

I already figured out that a lot of people don’t care much about security. Sometimes, IT managers fail to encrypt some info – it’s not their data anyway, so they don’t care. But what the Toyota people did is pretty nasty, since they show they couldn’t care less about their products. They went and built the Prius model, which some people find to be ugly, sold it for a lot of dough, around 25.000 Euros and guess what! It can be easily stolen, because whoever was handling cyber-based security was sloppy!

The Prius RFID key is very easy to hack. The signal that it emits is only 64-bit encrypted. Now, you all know that this type of encryption ca be easily cracked – so why deploy such a weak security measure when such a pricy car is involved. Toyota says that more powerful encryption would have been a lot more expensive. So what? I’d rather pay 26 instead of 25.000 and have my car secured. In any case, the worst part is that a thief that wants to steal your car doesn’t even need to strive too hard and steal your key or stuff like that. All he needs is a receiver to record the signal that you send when you make the key emit the signal through the air.

There are more powerful encryption methods, of course, like the 256 bit one. I’d sure like to see someone hack that one. Why they’re not paying attention to security I do not know, but more screw ups like this and they might lose some clients. I guess that they count on the fact that most people have no idea what 64 bit encryption means and that they have no clue if that is a good or bad thing when they buy the car. I sure hope that they’re going to care more about customers, or else, they’re going to lose them!

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