Two security researchers discovered a security vulnerability in Subaru’s Starlink-connected vehicles last year that gave them “unrestricted targeted access to all vehicles and customer accounts” across the U.S., Canada, and Japan, according to a Wired report.
The researchers, Sam Curry and Shubham Shah, alerted the Japanese automaker to the flaws in November and they were quickly fixed. Subaru told Wired that “after being notified by independent security researchers, [Subaru] discovered a vulnerability in its Starlink service that could potentially allow a third party to access Starlink accounts. The vulnerability was immediately closed and no customer information was ever accessed without authorization.”
The researchers said that a hacker who only knew the car owner’s last name and ZIP code, email address, phone number, or license plate could remotely start, stop, lock, unlock, and retrieve the current vehicle, retrieve any vehicle’s complete location history from the past year, and find personally identifiable information of any customer.
Curry and Shah said that similar web-based flaws have been found in several other carmakers, including Kia, Honda, and Toyota.
While Curry and Shah acknowledged the security fixes, they warned that simply patching security updates after issues were found isn’t enough to remedy the more pervasive issue of privacy in the automotive industry. And even if those vulnerabilities are all remedied, employees still have access to location data.
“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 told Wired. “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.”
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