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Researchers discovered critical flaws in Kia’s dealer portal that could allow to hack Kia cars made after 2013 using just their license plate.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In June 2024, a team of experts (Neiko Rivera<\/a>, Sam Curry<\/a>, Justin Rhinehart<\/a>, Ian Carroll<\/a>) discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Kia vehicles that allowed remote control of key functions using their license plates. The researchers demonstrated how to execute the attack in about 30 seconds on any hardware-equipped vehicle, regardless of its Kia Connect subscription status. Additionally, attackers could secretly obtain personal information such as the victim’s name, phone number, email, and physical address. This would allow the attacker to add themselves as a second, hidden user on the victim’s vehicle without their knowledge.<\/gwmw><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2022, some of the members of the above team of experts including the popular cybersecurity expert Sam Curry, discovered another set of vulnerabilities<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0impacting over a dozen car makers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The vulnerabilities could have been exploited by threat actors to perform a broad range of malicious activities, from unlocking cars to tracking them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The flaws discovered by the experts affected vehicles of popular brands, including Kia, Honda, Infiniti, Nissan, Acura, Mercedes-Benz, Genesis, BMW, Rolls Royce, Ferrari, Ford, Porsche, Toyota, Jaguar, Land Rover. The research team also discovered flaws in the services provided by Reviver, SiriusXM, and Spireon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exploitation of some flaws gave the experts access to hundreds of Mercedes mission-critical internal applications via improperly configured SSO. An attacker could have also exploited them to achieve remote code execution on multiple systems. The flaws also allowed attackers to access the content of the memory of some systems, leading to the exposure of Mercedes\u2019 employee\/customer PII.<\/gwmw><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the case of BMW and Rolls Royce, experts found SSO vulnerabilities that allowed them to access any employee application as any employee. The experts were able to access to internal dealer portals and retrieve sales documents for BMW by providing VIN numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The experts were also able to access any application locked behind SSO on behalf of any employee, including applications used by remote workers and dealerships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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