About a year ago, security researcher Sam Curry bought his mother a Subaru, on the condition that, at some point in the near future, she let him hack it.
It took Curry until last November, when he was home for Thanksgiving, to begin examining the 2023 Impreza’s internet-connected features and start looking for ways to exploit them. Sure enough, he and a researcher working with him online, Shubham Shah, soon discovered vulnerabilities in a Subaru web portal that let them hijack the ability to unlock the car, honk its horn, and start its ignition, reassigning control of those features to any phone or computer they chose.
Most disturbing for Curry, though, was that they found they could also track the Subaru’s location—not merely where it was at the moment but also where it had been for the entire year that his mother had owned it. The map of the car’s whereabouts was so accurate and detailed, Curry says, that he was able to see her doctor visits, the homes of the friends she visited, even which exact parking space his mother parked in every time she went to church.
A year of location data for Sam Curry’s mother’s 2023 Subaru Impreza that Curry and Shah were able to access in Subaru’s employee admin portal thanks to its security vulnerabilities.
Screenshot Courtesy of Sam Curry
“You can retrieve at least a year’s worth of location history for the car, where it’s pinged precisely, sometimes multiple times a day,” Curry says. “Whether somebody’s cheating on their wife or getting an abortion or part of some political group, there are a million scenarios where you could weaponize this against someone.”
Curry and Shah today revealed in a blog post their method for hacking and tracking millions of Subarus, which they believe would have allowed hackers to target any of the company’s vehicles equipped with its digital features known as Starlink in the US, Canada, or Japan. Vulnerabilities they found in a Subaru website intended for the company’s staff allowed them to hijack an employee’s account to both reassign control of cars’ Starlink features and also access all the vehicle location data available to employees, including the car’s location every time its engine started, as shown in their video below.
Curry and Shah reported their findings to Subaru in late November, and Subaru quickly patched its Starlink security flaws. But the researchers warn that the Subaru web vulnerabilities are just the latest in a long series of similar web-based flaws they and other security researchers working with them have found that have affected well over a dozen carmakers, including Acura, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Kia, Toyota, and many others. There’s little doubt, they say, that similarly serious hackable bugs exist in other auto companies’ web tools that have yet to be discovered.
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Last summer, Curry and another researcher, Neiko Rivera, demonstrated to WIRED that they could pull off a similar trick with any of millions of vehicles sold by Kia. Over the prior two years, a larger group of researchers, of which Curry and Shah are a part, discovered web-based security vulnerabilities that affected cars sold by Acura, BMW, Ferrari, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Rolls Royce, and Toyota.
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In December, information a whistleblower provided to the German hacker collective the Chaos Computer Computer and Der Spiegel revealed that Cariad, a software company that partners with Volkswagen, had left detailed location data for 800,000 electric vehicles publicly exposed online. Privacy researchers at the Mozilla Foundation in September warned in a report that “modern cars are a privacy nightmare,” noting that 92 percent give car owners little to no control over the data they collect, and 84 percent reserve the right to sell or share your information. (Subaru tells WIRED that it “does not sell location data.”)
“While we worried that our doorbells and watches that connect to the internet might be spying on us, car brands quietly entered the data business by turning their vehicles into powerful data-gobbling machines,” Mozilla’s report reads.
