The cute little kitteh you saw in your backyard this morning might not have just been chasing field mice, it was possibly scoping out your home Wi-Fi signal to see if it was unprotected.
Security researcher Gene Bransfield has figured out a fun way to map the vunerable Wi-Fi networks in his neighborhood. As reported in Wired, he outfitted his cat Coco with a specially-made collar built from a Wi-Fi card, GPS module, battery, and a Spark Core chip. The device runs custom software that looks for Wi-Fi signals and records ones that are open or poorly protected with old encryption like WEP, which can be easily broken.
The “WarKitteh Collar,” (Bransfield’s name, not ours). is an update of the Wardriving concept where hackers would drive through neighborhoods in a car with a laptop and search for unprotected Wi-Fi signals. While Bransfield says it was more of a lark instead of serious research he’s still surprised at what he found.
“I put some technology on a cat and let it roam around because the idea amused me. 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.”
