Two men in Houston, Texas have been arrested for stealing over 100 vehicles by using a laptop computer to hack into the cars to start them.

Michael Arce, 24, and Jesse Zelaya, 22, were arrested last weekend after officers caught them stealing a Jeep Grand Cherokee with a laptop and then driving it to southwest Houston, according to a report from the Houston Chronicle.

The pair, who had been stealing cars for months, were tailed following one of them being caught on camera complete with the use of the laptop inside the car to get it started; it’s not clear from the footage how the car was accessed although police said that in many cases the cars were left unlocked.

According to a spokesman from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles the thief broke into the vehicle and used a laptop to enter its VIN number in order to access the Chrysler database; dealerships, repair facilities and locksmiths are said to be the only ones with access to the database and the database itself provides codes for key fob access.

Once that data is obtained the theif could reprogram the car’s computer to accept a generic key fob.

The turn around time for the recorded theft was under two minutes.

What isn’t clear from reports is how the thieves obtained access to the database with police simply describing them as using pirated software, but even if they had a copy of the access program for the database they’d either have to have stolen login credentials from someone; have hacked into the system, or alternatively the software itself was completely insecure.

“As you get more and more computers installed in vehicles – if somebody has that knowledge and that ability, they can turn around and figure out a way to manipulate the system,” Houston police officer Jim Woods told the Chronicle. “If someone has turned around and pirated that software and uses that software for other illegal purposes, that’s something we can’t control,” Woods said.

Future

Chrysler Fiat vehicles have been exposed as having lax security before including a recall of 1.4 million Jeep Cherokee’s in 2015 after it was revealed that the entertainment system in the vehicles could be hijacked remotely and used to control the car itself.

While it’s not clear how the two thieves, in this case, obtained access to the data systems in the vehicles, let alone the Chrysler database, what is clear is that as more and more cars are primarily controlled by computer systems that this is something we’ll see far more of in the future.

Image credit: 55391407@N03/Flickr/CC by 2.0