Norway's Home Guard Found Its Chinese-Made Rental Cars Had Filmed Its Gate Codes
Soldiers kept driving them anyway, because there was nothing else to drive.
Commentary · Humour Real news, with jokes. The facts are sourced below; the snark is ours.
Modern cars come with lane assist, heated seats and, it turns out, a free security audit of your military base.
What happened
During a security exercise at Oslo airport on September 14 to 18, soldiers waiting in their vehicles tapped around on the dashboard screens and found videos recorded by the onboard cameras, AFP reports, citing Norwegian business paper Dagens Naeringsliv (DN). The footage showed who got in and out, the routes driven, and the codes used to open gates and doors at military facilities.
The cars were rentals. DN said at least two were Deepal models, made by Chinese state-controlled carmaker Changan, supplied to the army by Hertz Norge, which AFP notes is indirectly owned by the Chinese auto group Geely.
“Yes, soldiers from the Home Guard found videos from the vehicles’ sensors stored in their systems,” Home Guard spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Per Gunnar Grosberghaugen told AFP. Nobody knows whether the footage went anywhere else, and he couldn’t rule it out.
And then they kept driving
Here’s the part that makes it a Snark story. After finding the recordings, the military kept using the cars until the end of the exercise because it had no alternatives, DN reported. The soldiers deleted the videos.
The military has decided a general ban on Chinese-made vehicles would be out of proportion to the security gain. It prefers site-by-site rules, possibly banning any car with cameras and sensors, wherever it was made.
Hertz Norge says it complies with Norwegian and European rules. “Our customers’ data is safe with us,” marketing and communications director Hallvard Nerbovik told AFP, without saying whether the onboard videos might have been transferred.
The Snark take
Norway’s National Security Authority summed it up: modern vehicles are “rolling computers that collect information.” Armies spend fortunes guarding against spies, then rent a car that helpfully records the door codes. The fix so far is the same one used on every shared laptop: delete the history and hope.