Want to know how many open and unsecured networks there are in your neighborhood?
Well you don't have to get in the car with a laptop and start cruising the streets any longer.
Now you can get your cat to do the legwork.
As security professional Gene Bransfield describes it, the idea to send a cat out with a special WiFi roaming collar came to him after a fan at a conference presentation lent him a cat-tracking collar. As he recalls "me being the guy I am, all you need is a WiFi sniffing device and you'd have a War Kitteh," and so he started working on one.
It cost the principle security engineer, who works at Tenacity Solutions, about a $100 to make and he borrowed a cat from a relative. Wearing the device for three hours the cat, a Siamese named Coco, identified four routers using broken encryption and another four that had no encryption at all.
The collar Bransfield made featured a Spark Core chip housing custom-coded firmware, a WiFi card, a GPS module and a battery. Bransfield was expected to present his collar project at the DEF CON hacker event in Las Vegas this weekend.
In news reports Bransfield makes it clear the intent was not using a pet as any sort of security hacking tool or weapon or a way to find free WiFi. He was totally surprised by how many networks were still using the encryption WEP that is a decade old and easily broken.
"My intent was not to show people where to get free WiFi. I put some technology on a cat and let it roam around because the idea amused me," says Bransfield. "But the result of this cat research was that there were a lot more open and WEP-encrypted hotspots out there than there should be in 2014."
The security expert hopes the cat experiment will increase public awareness about WiFi security and that it's time to secure all those networks sprouting up.
"Cats are more interesting to people than information security," Bransfield says. "If people realize that a cat can pick up on their open WiFi hotspot, maybe that's a good thing."
