According to research firm Forrester, 35 percent of Americans—few of them Ars readers, we think—want Internet connectivity in their next vehicle. The car and tech industries are busy trying to make that auto Internet connectivity a reality. New cars increasingly come with their own LTE modems (and monthly bill), enabling remote apps for vehicle diagnostics or for unlocking car doors from the comfort of a phone or smartwatch. These apps and modems are usually connected in the cloud with plenty of thought given to security we're told—except in cases where there's no security at all.

But Mitsubishi's Outlander hybrid does things a bit differently, as the people over at PenTestPartners recently discovered. Instead of fitting the Outlander with a cellular modem for connectivity, you access its remote functions by connecting to the car's own Wi-Fi network. No monthly data plan needed, at the cost of connectivity being only within range of the vehicle. Oh, and apparently Mitsubishi did a really bad job securing things.

The outfit bought its own Outlander to investigate the car's security, finding the pre-shared key easily crackable and the default SSID too formulaic. Once connected to a vehicle, one can play with the lights or climate control—similar to the Nissan exploit. But the researchers also discovered they could lock or unlock the doors remotely, and, perhaps more seriously, they were also able to disable the car's alarm.

PenTestPartners says it has contacted Mitsubishi about the security hole, where it was "greeted with disinterest." If you own a Mitsubishi Outlander and don't like the idea of a hacker being able to disable your alarm, there are instructions on how to disable the system provided at the bottom of PenTestPartner's blog post.