How to Use Your Cat to Hack Your Neighbor's Wi-FiQuoteLate last month, a Siamese cat named Coco went wandering in his suburban Washington, DC neighborhood. He spent three hours exploring nearby backyards. He killed a mouse, whose carcass he thoughtfully brought home to his octogenarian owner, Nancy. And while he was out, Coco mapped dozens of his neighbors' Wi-Fi networks, identifying four routers that used an old, easily-broken form of encryption and another four that were left entirely unprotected.
Unbeknownst to Coco, he'd been fitted with a collar created by Nancy's granddaughter's husband, security researcher Gene Bransfield. And Bransfield had built into that collar a Spark Core chip loaded with his custom-coded firmware, a Wi-Fi card, a tiny GPS module and a battery—everything necessary to map all the networks in the neighborhood that would be vulnerable to any intruder or Wi-Fi mooch with, at most, some simple crypto-cracking tools.
In the 1980s, hackers used a technique called "wardialing," cycling through numbers with their modems to find unprotected computers far across the internet. The advent of Wi-Fi brought "wardriving," putting an antenna in a car and cruising a city to suss out weak and unprotected Wi-Fi networks. This weekend at the DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas, Bransfield will debut the next logical step: The "WarKitteh" collar, a device he built for less than $100 that turns any outdoor cat into a Wifi-sniffing hacker accomplice.
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/how-to-use-your-cat-to-hack-your-neighbors-wi-fi (http://www.wired.com/2014/08/how-to-use-your-cat-to-hack-your-neighbors-wi-fi)
;D LOL... Let's just turn all our pets into BORG. :P
(http://ct.weirdnutdaily.com/ol/wn/sw/i38/2/11/20/wnd_7305705afcb7a70d0f13a4a0283fd658.jpg)
Awesome.
My cats routinely find new websites for me, change the tv channel, help me cook. Hacking my neighbor's Wi-Fi shouldn't be too much of a leap.
Shasta