Some Questions from this weekend's game..., Hackers trying to take over the world! Options

[Faradon]

OK, so I'm an experienced 1st/2nd ed player, tried 3rd a couple times, but it wasn't the same, and have been trying to get back into SR4 now. That said, I've got some questions on some of the ways things were done during a game we played this weekend.

Note, almost all the other players are completely new to the system and haven't played any previous versions... so I doubt anything done was malicious / with intent to cheat. I'm posting this so we can learn from anything we did wrong, and try to be doing things the right way.

One other thing, I may inadvertently have some amount of spoiler information from the SRM (THE GRAB) contained in this post... so if you don't want anything for you SPOILED by reading it all, please just stop now. (any spoilers will try to be avoided though.)

That all being said, here we go...

Opening scene or two, party goes through the normal calls, meets with the johnson, and takes the job. Soon after they get into a fight with some gangers... during the fight, in a public place located in a nice part of town, a character who has the trait unlucky decides to lay down suppressing fire with a SMG in a parking lot.... bad things happened, end result was costing the group a point of notoriety and public awareness...

So, moving on, they end up doing some legwork... here's where a lot of the questions start, mainly in regards to hacking.

Hacker investigates location 1 in the middle of the night. (got to love the sleep regulator) Goes there and hacks into the 2 security drones in visual range (the long way using probe 1 hr tests I believe). Due to the seemingly security-free ratings on most devices in the adventure, this doesn't prove to be much of a challenge...

Then on to location 2, where he basically goes to break into someone's home. The group has a table rating of 0, making the "anti-hacker security" on the home (if I remember right) take 3 successes for him to get through... and pretty much never have a chance of beating his stealth of 5...

So within moments he's broken into the house computer system... I decided to make things SLIGHTLY more difficult, I would have the maglocks on the windows have a keypad on them rather than being part of the wireless network. Again with the mighty difficulty of 2-3 on these tests, a starting character was able to crack the outside of the maglock and hotwire the system in just a few seconds.

From there things went bad for the party with a not looking before they dove head-first into a concrete swimming pool... but that's not really part of any of my questions :)

Ok, last hacking issue / question...

Rigger is jacked into a vehicle... can the hacker get into the rigger's comlink and spoof the command to turn off the control rig? What all tests would normally be involved with this... what can the rigger do to stop him?

Thanks again.... sorry for anything that's obscuring the questions within story... but I kind of just also wanted to point out how "Un-secure" things seem... Heck, the hacker at one point had located the "hidden" enemy comlink, hacked the crypto, and was listening in after all of 3 IPs...

(encryption not very safe....)