Remember the days of watching the news and hearing about cars being stolen by car jackers breaking a window or rewiring the engine? It seems that those days are virtually nonexistent as new reports have surfaced revealing that tricky computer hackers have found a way to unlock cars and even get them started—all without a key.

How is this possible you may be thinking? Through the sending of text messages directly to a car's anti-theft system, of course.

In addition, these robbers even have the ability to review the driver’s latest locations through their GPS system. These actions are able to take place due to the fact that car alarms, GPS systems and other devices are connected to cellular telephone networks, enabling commands to be received through messaging.

An article featured on Yahoo.com recently discussed how researchers from iSEC Partners showed exactly how such an attack can take place through a demonstration using a Subaru Outback. This car had an easily hackable alarm system and the researchers reenacted the potentially dangerous situation through use of a laptop to show how extremely easy it was to send a message right to the Subaru's alarm system, which in effect unlocked the doors and started the engine.

With all increasingly popular forms of new ways to communicate, people are beginning to use texts for more reasons than just to let their parents know they are staying after school. In fact, these texts are being used as a way to perform an attack as users are left virtually wide open to these crimes as they currently have no way to block these incoming texts. At this current time, only operators of the phone networks have the ability to stop these crimes before they take place.

Research recently released from Don Bailey and Mat Solnik shows that such attacks are possible on multiple types of devices that use wireless communications chips such as ATMs, medical devices and even traffic lights.

Reading this article you may think that someone stealing your car is the worst way text messages can be used but you would be wrong. Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a group that closely analyses hacking threats stated that hackers might even be able to manipulate brakes and acceleration through these texts. "Doing one that is harmful is quite hard, but we need to prepare for people doing that," Borg added in a statement.

Additionally, Bailey said stricter security standards are greatly needed.

"We're so excited to use technology that we're deploying it too quickly and not really thinking about the impact of security," he commented.

Although this editor has to give credit where credit is due to these pretty intelligent thieves, this could be a very scary situation for all participants involved.

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