Hack Turns Cats Into Wi-Fi-Sniffing Spies (PCMagazine)

Security researcher Gene Bransfield shows the DefCon audience how they can turn their pet into a Wi-Fi spy.

It's not a drone mutiny or robot uprising we should be worried about, but animal warfare.

During last week's DefCon hacking conference, security researcher Gene Bransfield demonstrated his War Kitteh cat collar, and showed the audience how they, too, can turn their pet into a Wi-Fi spy.

To keep those who attend his talks engaged, Bransfield has long included photos and stories about cats in his rather technical presentations. After one presentation, an audience member offered him a cat-tracking collar that allows a pet owner to keep track of their feline around the neighborhood.

"Me being the guy I am, I thought 'All you need now is a Wi-Fi sniffing device and you'd have a War Kitteh,'" he said in a DefCon presentation summary. "I laughed, and started working on it."

But instead of simply keeping track of Fluffy as he perused the great outdoors, Bransfield decided to use the collar to sniff out insecure Wi-Fi setups. Bransfield, a principle system security engineer with Tenacity Solutions, outfitted the collar with custom-coded firmware, a Wi-Fi card, a miniature GPS module, and a battery, Wired reported.

He then sent Siamese cat Coco (pictured) off into a suburban Washington, D.C., neighborhood in hopes of identifying unprotected or weakly guarded Wi-Fi networks. Three hours later, the feline—owned by Bransfield's wife's grandmother—returned with data on eight routers that were left unprotected or were using a vulnerable form of encryption (and a mouse carcass).

Of the 23 Wi-Fi hotspots identified by the cat collar, more than a third remain exposed. Many, Bransfield said, were Verizon FiOS routers with unchanged default settings.

During his Sunday DefCon talk, the security researcher detailed the hack, offering instructions for anyone to replicate his WarKitteh collar, which uses the Spark Core Wi-Fi development board and Spark.io operating system.

Bransfield also took an opportunity at last week's hacking conference to discuss his Denial of Service Dog project, which he used to scan TVs in local bars, and turn them off with a remote control, the WiFi Pineapple Mark V wireless network auditing tool, and the TV-B-Gone kit—all attached to the pooch's back.

"There's no socially redeeming thing about the dog," he told The Guardian. "That was just trolling. I thought it would be funny so I did it."

For more, check out PCMag Live in the video below, which discusses the War Kitteh.