Yesterday Tommy Smitherman, owner of Smitherman’s Autobody was arraigned on 147 counts of reckless endangerment for hacking customer automobiles and reducing the effectiveness of their non-skid braking systems. The District Attorney’s Office claims that Smitherman hit upon a scheme to increase repeat business at this repair shop by increasing the time between reapplication of braking pressure on the non-skid braking systems of his customer’s automobiles.
Delano Police Chief, S. James Butts told reporters that the investigation leading to Smitherman’s arrest was initiated last year when there was a sudden surge in police vehicles involved in rear end accidents. “Our payments for fixing front-ends on our police cruisers tripled in a six-month period and our insurance costs skyrocketed,” Butts explained.
After the Department’s accident investigation team determined that most of the vehicles involved in rear-end collisions were taking longer than normal to stop, an outside investigation team from the Automotive Safety and Security Council (ASSC), was brought in to look at the vehicles. “Our cyber-forensics team determined that the braking system programing on all of the vehicles had been tampered with,” Ed Cole, ASSC spokesman, told reporters, “This is not the first time that we have seen this particular hack.”
Once the Delano Police Department knew what to look for, they checked each of the cars in the Department’s and the City’s fleet. “We found twenty cars with the modified braking system and all of them had been to Smitherman’s Body Shop in the last two years,” Chief Butts explained. The Department got a warrant to search Smitherman’s shop and home and investigators found the OBD2 Dongle that was used to reprogram the vehicles.
Cole told reporters that the ASSC was working with the Federal Bureau of Inquiry to try to track down the people that are selling the ‘Braking Bad Dongle’ that Smitherman used. “Smitherman does not have the technical knowledge necessary to write the programming necessary to modify the braking systems,” Cole explained, “He bought it from somebody, probably on the Dark Web. We want to find the distributor and shut them down.”
Johnathan Quest, spokesperson for the FBI, confirmed that the agency was working on the investigation. “We have talked to Smitherman, and he is not willing to discuss where he got the Dongle from or even acknowledge what the Dongle was used for,” Quest told reporters during a video link, “Right now we do not have a federal crime that we could charge Smitherman with to provide additional pressure to make him cooperate in our ongoing investigation.”
When asked why all of the charges against Smitherman were ‘reckless endangerment’, Butts explained that all of the accidents caused by this cyberattack were minor, with no serious personal injuries. “Currently, there were no other charges that could be brought against Tommy,” Butts said, “There are, however, a number of civil suits against Smitherman that will be filed next week; including one from our Department.”
Cole told reporters that there is discussion in the industry with car companies trying to get Smitherman and similar body shop owners using the Braking Bad Dongle charged with copyright infringement.
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