Europe Police have arrested 31 people for alleged involvement in a sophisticated plot to steal connected vehicles.
Police from France, Spain, and Latvia collaborated with Europol and the European judicial cooperation agency Eurojust to search 22 locations and seize more than €1 million in criminal assets.
Car thieves targeted two unnamed French car manufacturers, replacing legitimate software loaded onto vehicles with a tool marketed as a "automotive diagnostic solution."
According to Europol, this allowed them to open the doors and start the ignition without using the key fob. Other details are limited at this point, presumably to prevent copycat attacks. However, authorities arrested not only some of the suspected car thieves but also the suspected malware developers and resellers.
It's unclear whether the hacking tool was created by a single group and then used to steal cars, or if it was primarily sold to other criminal gangs.
The French Gendarmerie's Cybercrime Centre (C3N) launched the investigation, but Europol claimed to have been supporting the case since March 2022 with "extensive analysis and the dissemination of intelligence packages" to all affected countries. That would seem to imply that gangs from different jurisdictions used the same tools to gain access to and steal vehicles from the targeted manufacturers.
Europol also shared a screenshot of a domain seizure notice, which reads, "This service has been seized by the Gendarmerie Nationale cyberspace command under the authority of the French Paris Prosecutor's Office."
This implies that the hacking tool in question was being sold online to third parties. Although much research has been conducted in recent years on the potential threat to car safety from keyless entry attacks, there have been few notable real-life cases.
