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Thieves can easily get in you car


alpinedaddy

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There is a new piece of technology that allows theives to get in to any ford with keyless. They got in mine the other night using a device that extends the rfid the remote sends out. So even though my fobs were inside the house they were able to walk right up and open the door. Police highly recommend getting a rfid blocker box to store your keys in. This holiday has sucked due to a vulnerability ford needs to address.

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How could they get close enough to get the code from the remotes?

A key fob has a strong transmitter. How far away from the car can you lock and unlock it? They don't have to get close to it. The device receives the signal the car transmits when a door handle is touched. It retransmits that signal at much higher power so the fob can hear it. The fob sends its acknowledgement for the request directly to the car. The fix that is needed is that when responding to a request from the car the fob should use a power level similar to what he car used for the request. The higher power should only be used when a button on the fob is pushed. Are they going to recall every fob in existence? Don't hold your breath.

 

Wrapping a fob in two layers of aluminum foil will prevent it from communicating with the car, if removing the battery is too much trouble.

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The long range fob commands to lock/unlock are only sent when a button is pressed so they can't steal that unless you're actually pressing a button. The automatic rfid signals are very low power on purpose and I think the range is only a few feet. The fob would have to be close to an outside wall and the thieves would have to be right next to the house. Possible but not that easy to do.

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There was a story on Nightly news just a couple of weeks ago. They had a Ford Edge, Escape, Toyota Highlander, and one of the Dodge/Jeep ugly cousins. Don't recall which one. But all of them failed the same test.

 

But they claimed you had to be within feet of the person when you hit the lock button to steal the codes. In their demo, the guy was about 10 feet behind the person.

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The long range fob commands to lock/unlock are only sent when a button is pressed so they can't steal that unless you're actually pressing a button. The automatic rfid signals are very low power on purpose and I think the range is only a few feet. The fob would have to be close to an outside wall and the thieves would have to be right next to the house. Possible but not that easy to do.

Exactly. Actually Ford says fob needs to be within 3ft of handle to unlock with touch. Don't believe me, have someone with a fob stand on drivers side and see if someone on passenger side can unlock with touch. It won't work. Each handle has an antenna inside.

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Also, I read somewhere a while back high end thieves are not waiting the 10-15min to reprogram keys. They are actually using the dlc to corrupt the anti theft software. Any Ford can be reprogrammed with an IDS in ten minutes. However, you have to have a fob to program. So it's definitely a pre planned operation. Since the dlc placement and size are standardized it makes it easier. Pre 96 the dlc could be anywhere.

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What's the chance of this happening? Probably most likely in CA or east coast than middle America. News programs like to make this seem like a wide spread problem, when the truth is, yes, the technology, is out there, but it's most likely not happening very often. I'll sleep good tonight.

It's happened in Detroit a few times. I've seen editorials on the local news about it.
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