themoscowtimes.com
Dec. 2, 2025
Hundreds of Porsche vehicles across Russia have been rendered undriveable after a failure in their factory-installed satellite security system, according to reports from owners and dealerships.
Drivers in Moscow, Krasnodar and other cities began reporting sudden engine shutdowns and fuel-delivery blockages last week, effectively immobilizing their vehicles.
Rolf, Russia’s largest dealership group, said service requests spiked on Friday as cars lost connection to their onboard alarm modules, which are linked via satellite.
The outage affects all Porsche models and engine types, and any vehicle could potentially lock itself automatically, a Rolf representative told the RBC news website.
“It’s possible this was done deliberately,” the representative was quoted as saying, though no evidence has emerged to support that claim.
Owners’ groups say the problem appears tied to the Vehicle Tracking System, or VTS, which is an onboard security module.
The Russian Porsche Macan Club said some drivers had restored function by disabling or rebooting the VTS, while others reported success after disconnecting their car batteries for up to 10 hours, according to the Telegram channel Mash.
Rolf said specialists were still investigating the root cause of the problem. Porsche’s office in Russia and its global headquarters in Germany have not yet commented on the system failure.
Porsche halted deliveries and suspended its commercial operations in Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. However, the company still retains ownership of three subsidiaries in the country, which it has so far been unable to sell.
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.
