Cats might own the Internet, or at least a part of YouTube and Instagram, but now they're also helpful in another way: hacking the Internet. A new collar, designed for tracking down weak and unprotected Wi-Fi connections, allows cats to roam their neighborhoods and report back to their humans the status of their community's Wi-Fi.
A cat named Coco wore this collar recently in Las Vegas. By roaming around her neighborhood, she helped identify four networks that were using outdated and weak encryption techniques (WEP), as well as four others that weren't protected at all and had no passwords. Coco, of course, also brought back a dead mouse.
So how was this accomplished? The idea started out as a joke. Security researcher Gene Bransfield thought the collar might be fun, so he spent time creating it with a Spark Core Wi-Fi development board running the Spark.io operating system. This allowed constant connectivity for the cat. This was packed into a custom-made leopard print collar. GPS tracked location data, storing it on a simple SD memory card.
Bransfield first tested the collar on a cat named Skitzy, but that mission was a flop: Skitzy used up the collar's battery by sitting on a co-worker's front porch until the battery was dead.
However, Coco was a better cat spy and consistently roamed around the neighborhood exposing vulnerabilities in over 20 Wi-Fi networks. Bransfield mapped out those networks with a program that uses Google Earth's API.
"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," says Bransfield. "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."
So what can we learn from this experiment? Bransfield insists that his goal is to make people aware about how they can better secure the Wi-Fi networks in their homes. By using cats, he hopes that people with less technological know-how are paying attention.
"Cats are more interesting to people than information security," says Bransfield. "If people realize that a cat can pick up on their open Wi-Fi hotspot, maybe that's a good thing."
Bransfield stresses the importance of using WPA-2, which is the new standard on modern routers, as well as having good passwords in place. It's also important not to use a router's default settings.
