Just when you thought your neighbor's adorable cat couldn't possibly do any harm, the feline kingdom unleashes a brand new kind of threat to humanity - the kind that involves Wi-Fi, hacking and Internet security.
Internet researcher and system security engineer at Tenacity Solutions Gene Bransfield set out on a mission to amuse himself by strapping his wife's grandmother's Siamese cat Coco with a collar sewed in with a sub-$100 device that could map out all the Wi-Fi networks in the area and find out which ones are vulnerable to hackers. Although no news has yet been reported of cat-hackers prowling American neighborhoods, Bransfield says anyone with a bit of technical skill can easily put together a Spark Core chip, a GPS module, a Wi-Fi card, a battery and special firmware and attach it to a cat to sneak around a neighborhood and suss out vulnerable Wi-Fi networks.
After three hours of making the roundabouts, Coco returned to Bransfield with the results of his data-gathering trip. The results? More than one-third or eight out of 23 of Bransfield's neighbors are still using an ages-old form of wireless encryption called WEP, which has a reputation throughout the technology industry as easily vulnerable to hacking. While experts strongly recommend everyone to switch over to the more secure WPA, Bransfield was able to easily map his neighborhood's weakest spots using a program using Google Earth API. Majority of those weak spots, he says, use Verizon FiOS routers using the default settings.
"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 says. "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."
Bransfield's efforts at self-entertainment, which he will speak about in more detail at the Las Vegas DefCon hacker conference, is a spin-off of a method called wardialing, a technique used by hackers in the 1980s to find unprotected computers by cycling through numbers using their modems. This technique gave rise to wardriving, where hackers use an antenna on top of their cars and cruise through the neighborhood to discover vulnerable networks they can mooch off. The new method, which Bransfield calls WarKitteh, is far more dangerous, since anyone can easily mistake those fearsome felines for cute, innocent creatures.
