[ralferoo]

Hehe, just reading that.

> The poster described how she was able to retrieve her car after service just by giving the attendant her last name. Now any normal car owner would be happy about how easy it was to get her car back, but someone with a security mindset immediately thinks: “Can I really get a car just by knowing the last name of someone whose car is being serviced?”

Just a couple of hours ago, I picked my car up from having its obligatory annual vehicle check. I walked past it and went into their office, saying "I'm here to pick up my car". "Which one is it?" "The Golf" "Oh, the $MODEL?" (it was the only Golf in their car park) "Yeah". And then after payment of £30, the keys were handed over without checking of anything, not even a confirmation of my surname. This was a different guy to the one who was in there an hour earlier when I dropped the car off.

[duxup]

I feel like that car security situation also is sort of setup to tell us about how folks with a security mindset can go overboard?

Some car dealership who never had a car stolen hires a consultant and they identify this pickup situation as a problem. Then they implement some wild security and now customers who just dropped off their car, just talked to the same customer service person about the weather ... have to go through some extra security to impersonally prove who they are, because someone imagined a problem that has never occurred (or nearly never). But here we go doing the security dance because someone imagined a problem that really has nothing to do with how people actually steal cars...

Computers and the internet are different of course, the volume of possibilities / bad actors you could be exposed to are seemingly endless. Yet even there security mindset can go overboard.

I'm currently trying to recover/move some developer accounts for some services because we had someone leave the company less than gracefully. Often I have my own account, it's part of an organization ... but moving ownership is an arduous and bizarrely different process for each company. I get it, you wouldn't want someone to take over our no name organization, but the process all seem to involve extra steps piled on "for security". The fact that I'm already a customer, have an account in good standing, part of the organization, the organization account holder has been inactive ... doesn't seem to matter at all, I may as well be a stranger from the outside, presumably because of "security".

[ryandrake]

It certainly feels that way here in 2026. It seems like I'm spending so much time "verifying" and "authenticating" and clicking somewhere so that the service can send me a code in E-mail. And more and more services are getting super aggressive. Biometrics, 2FA, uploading government ID, uploading face scans... Good grief!

I can imagine being in info-sec is a rough life. When you get breached, they're blamed. So they spend all their time red-teaming and coming up with outlandish ways that their systems can be compromised, and equally outlandish hoops for users to jump through just to use their product. So the product gets all these hoops. And then an attacker gets even more creative, breaches you again, and now your product has horrible UX + you're still getting breached.

[xp84]

The way so-called ‘2fa’ has been implemented on 90% of the things I interact with as a consumer is an absolute farce. Control of a SIM is nearly 100% of the time sufficient to get absolute control of any account, and showing a $50 fake ID to a teenager at a cell phone store has probably a 99% success rate. Only sites for nerds, plus Google and Microsoft, support TOTP or passkeys. Everywhere else uses the sms BS for 2fa or often effectively 1fa if it can be used to reset the first factor. And these same idiots lecture you for your 100-character password for not containing “at least one of these SIX “special characters”, an upper, a lower, and a digit. `Password1!` is a suitable password to these systems.

[icedchai]

Don't forget about password reset policies. At one place with a dedicated "security theater" team, I have to change my password every 90 days, so I just add the year and month to a base password. Password!2602 it is!

[tracker1]

On the flip side... I can't tell you how many times I've had to explain how public/private key crypto works do developers and IT security staff working in government projects. And this is just for one-way trust of JWTs for SSO integrations.

I mean, I don't mind if the same dev public-keys are used nearly everywhere in internal dev and testing environments... but JFC, don't deploy them to client infrastructure for our apps.

FWIW, aside... for about the last decade, I generally separate auth from the application I'm working with, relying on a limited set of established roles and RSA signed JWTs, allowing for the configuration of one or more issuers. This allows for a "devauth" that you can run locally for a whoever you want usage. While more easily integrating into other SSO systems and bridges with other auth services/systems in differing production environments. Even with firm SSO/Ouath, etc services, it's still the gist of configuration.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

And then some person realizes that government ids can be faked, so they set up a system of doing a retinal scan of the person dropping off the car and then comparing it to the retinal scan of the person picking it up.

Then they realize that one person may be bribed so they require at least two people to verify at pickup and drop off.

Meanwhile, a car has never ever been stolen this way.

[tracker1]

And when I need my wife to pickup my car for me because I took hers to work and she's taking an Uber to get my car...?

Definitely over the top issue.

[duxup]

Yup, it's taking me probably 10x longer gathering legitimate documents to send to these companies.

Meanwhile I could fake them all in a fairly short amount of time...

[Spooky23]

It’s a risk/reward scenario, and an example of security minded people chasing ghosts.

The likelihood of conmen stealing VW Golfs from repair shops is a really low risk/high impact event. So they could demand your passport and piss you off or have you leave a happy customer.

In the remote chance the con artist strikes, it’s a general liability covered by insurance.

[Nextgrid]

The difference is that car theft is still prosecuted by police, where as cybercrime is not (unless you embarrass a huge corporation).

So the garage can have lower security because even potential thieves do a risk/reward calculation and the vast majority choose not to proceed with it.

Online, the risk/reward calculation is different (what risk?), so more people will be tempted to try (even for the lolz - not every act of cybercrime is done for monetary purposes).

[RajT88]

The fact that so many things in the world work like this is the reason for the continued appeal of heist movies. Those always contain clever bits of social engineering and confidence scams which move the plot along - and they are as believable today as they always were.

[direwolf20]

Besides thinking about how to steal a car, we can think about how the dealership stops you stealing a car. Your face is plastered all over several cameras, and they know the license plate.

[Wowfunhappy]

Aren't there easier ways to steal cars? Like, go to an open parking lot, pick the lock, and start the car by connecting the right wires.

It's risky, sure. But the garage situation also seems risky.

[MisterTea]

It's even easier than that. A lot of older ignition locks could be defeated by a screwdriver so you just smash the window, jimmy the ignition lock with the screw driver and off you go! There was a specific model of jeep that was stolen a lot because the rear lock could be popped out easily with pliers, a matching key made, and you return later with the key to steal the car.

[jamesfinlayson]

> start the car by connecting the right wires

I might be misinformed but I've been told that for a while now (maybe 20 years or so), new cars have been built to be exceptionally difficult to hot-wire.

A South African friend told me that some brand of four wheel drive could be hot-wired but it involved getting behind one of the front head-lamp bulbs - doable, but a damaging process if you're in a rush.

[koverstreet]

You'd have to be stupid and desperate to steal from a garage.

The people who work there aren't office workers; you've got blue collar workers who spend all day working together and hanging out using heavy equipment right in the back. And they're going to be well acquainted with the local tow truck drivers and the local police - so unless you're somewhere like Detroit, you better be on your way across state lines the moment you're out of there. And you're not conning a typical corporate drone who sees 100 faces a day; they'll be able to give a good description.

And then what? You're either stuck filing off VINs and faking a bunch of paperwork, or you have to sell it to a chop shop. The only way it'd plausibly have a decent enough payoff is if you're scouting for unique vehicles with some value (say, a mint condition 3000GT), but that's an even worse proposition for social engineering - people working in a garage are car guys, when someone brings in a cool vehicle everyone's talking about it and the guy who brought it in. Good luck with that :)

Dealership? Even worse proposition, they're actual targets so they know how to track down missing vehicles.

If you really want to steal a car via social engineering, hit a car rental place, give them fake documentation, then drive to a different state to unload it - you still have to fake all the paperwork, and strip anything that identifies it as a rental, and you won't be able to sell to anyone reputable so it'll be a slow process, and you'll need to disguise your appearance differently both times so descriptions don't match later. IOW - if you're doing it right so it has a chance in hell of working, that office job starts to sound a whole lot less tedious.

Way easier to just write code :)

[SR2Z]

Stolen cars are often sold for low amounts of money - like $50 - and then used to commit crimes that are not traceable from their plates. It hasn't really been possible to steal and resell a car in the United States for many years, barring a few carefully watched loopholes (Vermont out-of-state registrations is one example that was recently closed).

When Kia and Hyundai were recently selling models without real keys or ignition interlocks, that was the main thing folks did when they stole them.

[foldor]

In Canada there's been a big problem with stolen cars lately. Mostly trucks, and other high value vehicles though. Selling them locally isn't feasible, but there's a criminal organization that's gotten very good at getting them on container ships and out to countries that don't care if the vehicles are stolen. So even with tracking, there's nothing people can do. Stopping it at the port is the obvious fix, but somehow that's not what is being done. Probably bribery to look the other way.

[jamesfinlayson]

Same thing in Australia - some gang was busted recently for stealing mid-range four wheel drives, packing them in shipping containers with partially dismantled cars (I guess so that a cursory inspection would just show "car parts" rather than a single nice looking car) and then shipping them around the world (I guess an overseas buyer isn't checking if a car with this VIN has been stolen on the other side of the world).

[koverstreet]

Yeah, the only way to do it would be a cash transaction where you'd have to forge a legitimate looking title/registration and pass it off to a naive buyer. So it's still technically possible, but not in any kind of remotely scalable way.

[b00ty4breakfast]

I reckon it is infinitely riskier to be caught attempting to break into a car than it is to just walk in to a service garage and pretending you own the Vdub in the parking lot. There is still a bit of deniability in the 2nd option but good luck explaining to the police why you are using a set of tools specifically for picking vehicle locks (because you can't just use regular pick and tension wrenches) to break into a vehicle that you don't own.