“War-Driving” and “War-Kittehs”
As you know, on the Internet cats are lauded and there are tons of videos, photos, etc. of cats. In Internet lingo “kittehs” (sic). By the way, for those of you from Rio Linda, “sic” means I MEANT to type it that way! Anyway, then there is also the ancient computer hacker pastime of “War Driving,” that is, driving through a community with equipment to find open WiFi signals, and soundly mocking the idiots that have open WiFi (or, other more nefarious pastimes, once they are found… but I digress!
Anyway, combine the two, and you have a “War-Kitteh!” this was one of the many reports on the “War-Kitteh” this week:
Coco the cat can hack your WiFi network with his WarKitteh collar
Geek – By: Lee Matthews “Your cat probably does some pretty awesome, YouTube-worthy tricks. Chances are, however, that your cat isn’t quite the geeky little feline that Coco is. Coco, you see, can hack WiFi networks.
Not on his own, mind you. Coco’s got a special collar that was whipped up by security researcher Gene Bransfield. Now, most professionals who want to “research” the security of the WiFi connections in their neighborhoods will do a bit of wardriving or rig up a drone to do a little sniffing around. Bransfield thought that enlisting the aid of a cat would be both hilarious and fun.
He spent hours upon hours creating WarKitteh, a fur-wrapped collar that’s wired for WiFi reconnaissance. It’s not a clunky, cat-strangling hack either. Bransfield’s contraption is a little thick due to the electronics and battery, but only about as wide and long as an ordinary cat collar. It’s built around a GPS-enabled pet collar like the GeoDog and equipped with the Arduino-firendly Spark WiFi module.
While Bransfield has all the electronic and coding skills required to whip up WarKitteh himself, he needed a bit of help from a kindly neighbor lady to finish the collar off. Once the leopard print sleeve was sewn, he was ready to slip it on to a cat and see just how secure his neighbor’s WiFi networks really were.
His first feline operative, Skitzy, turned out to be a little too laid back to be of much use. Bransfield called for back-up, and Coco answered. On his first tour of the area, Coco and WarKitteh sniffed out 23 WiFi networks. Amazingly, a third of them were using horribly outdated, insecure WEP encryption.
Bransfield is hopeful that his project will increase awareness and convince people that it’s time to pay more attention to the security of their home networks. Sadly, I’m inclined to think that the vast majority of Internet users would be far more interested in the bouncing cat icon on his WarKitteh map than the fact that someone figured out how to turn a cat with a collar into a network hacker’s tool.”
