explicitClick to confirm you are 18+

How to get your cat to hack your neighbor's Wi-Fi passwords

Truth?Mar 25, 2016, 12:51:35 AM
thumb_up36thumb_downmore_vert

A clever security researcher has discovered a way to use his feline friend to map nearby vulnerable wi-fi networks.

Gene Bransfield tested his device on his wife's grandmother's pet cat Coco with great success.  In the experiment, he used a custom-built collar, equipped with a Wi-Fi card, GPS module, Spark Core chip and battery.  He has dubbed the experiment "Warkitteh" -- based on "Wardriving", a term hackers use for accessing unsecured Wi-Fi connections from a parked car.

 

 

The Hacker News reports, "Bransfield explained his experiment “Warkitteh” at DefCon, a hacker conference that is taking place this weekend in Las Vegas, in his talk titled “How to Weaponize your Pets”."

The WarKitteh collar is meant to be more of a fun experiment and a joke, rather than a serious hacking tool.

 

 

“My intent was not to show people where to get free Wi-Fi. I put some technology on a cat and let it roam around because the idea amused me,” Bransfield, who works for the security consultancy Tenacity told Wired. “But the result of this cat research was that there were a lot more open and WEP-encrypted hot spots out there than there should be in 2014.”

In the experiment, Coco was able to map 23 W-Fi networks on his three-hour walk through the neighborhood.

As a security researcher, he hopes this experiment will help inform people of the importance of keeping their networks secure.  “Cats are more interesting to people than information security,” Bransfield says. “If people realize that a cat can pick up on their open Wi-Fi hotspot, maybe that’s a good thing.”