Intoxalock: a cyberattack locks cars in the United States

On 14 March 2026, Intoxalock — a US maker of court-ordered ignition-interlock breathalyzers that prevent a vehicle from starting until the driver passes an alcohol test — was hit by a cyberattack that knocked its back-end systems offline for roughly a week. The company described the incident as "a flood of traffic designed to overwhelm and take offline" its servers, consistent with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack rather than data theft.

The outage did not disable the in-car devices directly, but it crippled the centralized services they depend on — chiefly the periodic calibration that interlock units require. Drivers whose devices needed calibration during the pause found their vehicles immobilized, with no quick way to recover. Installations, calibrations, account access, and other court-ordered interlock services were all disrupted.

Disrupted services included:

• Device calibration (the main cause of immobilized vehicles)
• New device installations
• Customer account access
• Court-ordered compliance and reporting functions

Intoxalock estimated that roughly 150,000 drivers across 46 states were potentially affected, while stressing that only those needing a calibration during the pause were stranded — "not the majority" of its customers. The company restored its systems by 22 March 2026, waived related fees, granted 10-day calibration extensions, offered towing reimbursement, and stood up an app-based calibration workaround and an SMS support line. A class-action lawsuit filed in late March alleges the attackers also stole large quantities of company data, though no data exfiltration has been independently confirmed.