Autowatch Ghost Secu­ri­ty for your Lux­u­ry Car

It’s a ghost. Get it? 

With vehi­cle crime on the rise in the UK, espe­cial­ly dur­ing lock­down, peo­ple who own Lux­u­ry Cars are on the look­out for ways to deter thieves. There is a range of solu­tions aside from sit­ting up all night watch­ing it because you are ter­ri­fied of it get­ting stolen. These range from Fara­day wal­lets, Key­less Pro­tec­tors and GPS track­ing all the way up to Autowatch Security’s Ghost secu­ri­ty sys­tem. Ghost is tru­ly at the cut­ting edge of auto­mo­tive secu­ri­ty and makes it nigh on impos­si­ble for thieves to dri­ve away in your vehi­cle. Not con­cerned about vehi­cle crime? Just look at this Vehi­cle Crime Map of Not­ting­ham City Cen­tre below. 

What is Autowatch Ghost? 

Autowatch Ghost is a sec­ondary CAN bus immo­bilis­er that is installed into your vehi­cle, which pro­tects your car from meth­ods of theft such as key-cloning, key hack­ing or even some­one just plain steal­ing your car key from your hand in broad day­light. Ghost is well hid­den with­in the vehi­cle, so there is no indi­ca­tion of the loca­tion of the immo­bilis­er from the out­side, as it has no key fobs or LEDs to give it away. Addi­tion­al­ly, some deal­ers say you shouldn’t tell even your best friend that you have Ghost installed on your vehi­cle. Ghost is a bit like a bank card in that it requires a ​‘PIN code’ to deac­ti­vate the immo­bilis­er unit. This is done with a series of but­ton press­es with­in the vehi­cle; this can be a sequence of up to 20 actions long for the par­tic­u­lar­ly para­noid. Exam­ples of this could include flick­ing the indi­ca­tor but­ton and then press­ing a series of but­tons on the cen­tre con­sole. This sequence is pro­grammed by you after the instal­la­tion of Ghost, and dur­ing the instal­la­tion, you will also receive a unique Emer­gency reset pin which will allow you to reset your pass­word if you for­get it. Autowatch Ghost is also a TAS­SA Ver­i­fied secu­ri­ty sys­tem which means it has been scru­ti­nised by third-par­ty indus­try experts from police and secu­ri­ty test­ing backgrounds.

Relay Attacks

Autowatch Ghost is also an excel­lent defence against relay attacks, where a pair of thieves will boost the sig­nal of your key using an ampli­fi­er and then use a receiv­er posi­tioned near the car in order to unlock it and start the igni­tion before dri­ving your car away. Autowatch Ghost pre­vents this by not allow­ing the car to start even if the thief phys­i­cal­ly had your key in the ignition.

This is one of many rea­sons why Autowatch Ghost pro­vides unri­valled secu­ri­ty in the auto­mo­tive indus­try. Relay attacks have become an increas­ing­ly more fre­quent method of steal­ing mod­ern cars as it can take as lit­tle as thir­ty sec­onds to per­form this attack, and the equip­ment need­ed to car­ry it out is rea­son­ably cheap. Your vehi­cle will be vul­ner­a­ble if it has a key­less remote entry/​start sys­tem or even just an ​“Info­tain­ment” sys­tem on board. 

Com­pat­i­bil­i­ty

Autowatch Ghost is com­pat­i­ble with a wide array of vehi­cles. There are too many to list here. It seems the ear­li­est adopters of Autowatch Ghost were MINI, with the year 2000 Coun­try­man [R60] being the old­est sup­port­ed mod­el. The next adopters were the 2003 Golf [mk5] and the Bent­ley Con­ti­nen­tal GT [mk1]. For a full list of vehi­cles, click the link here. Thanks for reading. 

The 3D Autokeys Team