During the fall of 2022, a few friends and I took a road trip from Chicago, IL to Washington, DC to attend a cybersecurity conference and (try) to take a break from our usual computer work.

While we were visiting the University of Maryland, we came across a fleet of electric scooters scattered across the campus and couldn't resist poking at the scooter's mobile app. To our surprise, our actions caused the horns and headlights on all of the scooters to turn on and stay on for 15 minutes straight.

When everything eventually settled down, we sent a report over to the scooter manufacturer and became super interested in trying to more ways to make more things honk. We brainstormed for a while, and then realized that nearly every automobile manufactured in the last 5 years had nearly identical functionality. If an attacker were able to find vulnerabilities in the API endpoints that vehicle telematics systems used, they could honk the horn, flash the lights, remotely track, lock/unlock, and start/stop vehicles, completely remotely.