Move over blood hounds. Now there's a cat who detects WiFi signals!
Security researcher Gene Bransfield, however, found a way to use his pet cat Coco to do just that, outfitting the animal with technology for mapping the Wi-Fi networks in his neighborhood, according to The Verge.
The cat was sent on the mission with a high-tech collar featuring a Wi-Fi card, a GPS module, a battery, and a Spark Core Chip, which is capable of looking for Wi-Fi signals and recording those that are open, or use old encryptions, such as WEP, and therefore lack strong protection.
Unaware of what his collar was doing, Coco explored nearby backyards for three yards, with one-third of the 23 Wi-Fi hotspots it found being open to be hacked. These networks were mapped in a program created by an Internet collaborator that uses Google Earth's API. Bransfield said he was surprised by how many vulnerable access points he found, and that some of the WEP connections were Verizon FiOS routers with default settings that were left uncharged, Wired reported.
Bransfield's technology is a new version of "wardialing," a technique in which hackers cycle through numbers of their modems so they can find unprotected computers all around the Web. He is set to debut the next stage of the technique called the "WarKitteh" collar at this weekend's DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas. The device enables any cat to become a spy, and only cost less than $100 to build.
The collar was not designed to be a serious hacking tool, however, and instead was built for fun, and as a way for Bransfield to test its abilities, The Verge reported. Bransfield said he decided to turn his cat into a hacker because he found the idea amusing.
"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," he added.
Bransfield said that while the collar was only meant to serve for entertainment, he hopes the public can learn how important it is to have effective security, Wired reported.
"Cats are more interesting to people than information security," he explained. "If people realize that a cat can pick up on their open Wi-Fi hotspot, maybe that's a good thing."
