Cat Sniffs Out Free Wi-Fi in D.C. Suburb

In a Washington, D.C., suburb, Coco the Siamese cat took a stroll recently. The cat was used to seek out vulnerable WiFi connections in the neighborhood for a harmless hack exercise.

Security researcher Gene Bransfield shared the results at the DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas during a presentation titled, “Weaponiznig Your Pets.”

“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,” Bransfield told Wired Magazine. “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.”

Read more of the Wired article.

Bransfield is a principle security engineer at Tenacity Solutions, a Reston firm. He has a Masters in Information Security and Assurance from George Mason University, according to his bio at the DefCon website.

“After delivering a presentation wherein I used many images of cats for humor value, an audience member offered to lend me their cat tracking collar,” Bransfield said in a Tenacity release previewing the conference talk. “The collar contained a GPS device and a cellular component and would track your cats movements throughout the neighborhood. If you got nervous, you could send the device an SMS message to receive a current GPS hit on the collar’s location. Me being the guy I am, I thought, ‘All you need now is a WiFi sniffing device and you’d have a War Kitteh.’”

You can watch a YouTube video of Bransfield’s previous “Weaponizing Your Pets” presentation at Shmoocon Firesides 2014, where he won Best Fire Talk honors.

Photo: Patch file.