10 years after his epic MySpace hack, Samy Kamkar is trying to turn hackers into heroes

Samy Kamkar is in a dark room in Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas; the room is lit by blue lights and the glow of laptop screens. A DJ is spinning lyric-less music while hackers sit at round tables intermittently coding and chatting. This is the designated “chill-out room” at DEFCON, the annual hacking convention, but Kamkar is not feeling chill at the moment. He’s preparing to give a presentation to thousands of fellow hackers on how to “wirelessly steal cars,” and he’s still putting the finishing touches on his PowerPoint.

“I submitted the idea for this talk months ago, but I only did the work for it in the last two weeks,” he explains. Kamkar, 29, knew the conference organizers would choose a talk about hacking cars, and he was so sure he’d find a security flaw that he proposed the talk before he actually found one. And he was right; in the month before the conference, he built a device that can wirelessly unlock people’s cars.

“This security flaw has been known about for 20 years. That’s why we have those RSA tokens with codes that only last for seconds,” he says. “But you need a good demo for the car industry to take it seriously.”