LAS VEGAS--Forget Wi-Fi war driving. Now it's war flying.
A pair of security engineers showed up at the Black Hat security conference here to show off a prototype that can eavesdrop on Wi-Fi, phone, and Bluetooth signals: a retrofitted U.S. Army target drone, bristling with electronic gear and an array of antennas.
"Nobody's really looking at this from a threat perspective," said Mike Tassey, a security consultant who works for the U.S. government intelligence community. "There's some pretty evil stuff you can do from the sky."
The term war driving, meaning searching for Wi-Fi networks from a moving vehicle, was coined approximately a decade ago, of course (here's a CNET article from 2002). But aerial drones can gain access to places that might be off-limits to vehicles--and, in theory, can follow a moving signal surreptitiously from above.
Their prototype Wi-Fi drone, which was brought on stage yesterday but not flown, is made of reinforced foam and can carry 20 pounds. They added landing gear, a 2.5 horsepower motor powered by lithium polymer batteries, a telemetry link, an onboard computer running Ubuntu, and a payload of wireless sniffers and network-cracking tools.
"We can identify a target by his cell phone and follow him home to where enterprise security doesn't reach," Rich Perkins, a security engineer who describes his job as "supporting the U.S. government" and co-created the drone. "We can reverse engineer someone's life."
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