a homemade radio that can unlock Volkswagen,Audi and other big brand cars.

Many of the Volkswagen cars sold since 1995 can easily be unlocked by hackers, according to a team of researchers. A large number of the 100 million cars sold in the last 20 years by Volkswagen - also including the Audi, Seat and Skoda brands- can be unlocked using just a homemade radio that costs about 30 pound sterling.

The cheap equipment allows hackers to listen in on the signals sent by the keys to their cars. Those signals can then be replicated using the same equipment. Volkswagen has said that it is aware of the problem and is working with the researchers who found it. The issues are described by researchers from the university of Birmingham and German security company Kasper & Oswald. Their paper lays out two separate ways of doing the attack which would compromise the locking systems on VW cars.

The researchers say that once they worked to clone the digital keys, they could reverse-engineer the systems used
in the affected models. After doing that they found Volkswagen has said that it wouldn't be possible to start a car using the attack.