4 ms·

The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

247 points by neom 2mo ago

staplung 2mo ago
Partial summary: -ESP32 based device that tries to detect bluetooth/MAC addresses of flock cameras and beeps when it does - a Stingray detector that runs on a second-hand mobile hotspot - a device that alerts you about things that are moving approximately with you (AirTags, SSIDs, etc).
- pavel_lishin 2mo ago
  > ESP32 based device that tries to detect bluetooth/MAC addresses of flock cameras and beeps when it does Is it this thing? https://simeononsecurity.com/articles/flock-you-detection-project-counter-surveillance-hardware-guide-2026/ https://simeononsecurity.com/articles/flock-you-detection-pr...
  - addandsubtract 2mo ago
    Yea, it's the OUI Spy board: https://github.com/colonelpanichacks/oui-spy https://github.com/colonelpanichacks/oui-spy
- em3ritus 2mo ago
  The last project is this, it actually does a lot more. https://github.com/Em3ritus/simulacra https://github.com/Em3ritus/simulacra
- _blk 2mo ago
  Cool, I like the esp idea but won't you have to walk fairly slowly with a default ESP antenna? High gain might be better.. If you're wearing a cap you may not care as much being seem from above vs from the front. Maybe attach a little windspeed meter to the top of the antenna on your hat too ;)
- Joel_Mckay 2mo ago
  Sigh, researchers used to publish cutting edge stuff. That list reads like a fist year lab schedule. lol =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBlAMqoJ5BA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBlAMqoJ5BA
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    It's cutting edge (in the US at least) for citizen activism and individual anti-tracking protection, has to count for something no?
    - Joel_Mckay 2mo ago
      Voting, and participating locally in policy discussions has far greater traction. The fact is with satellite to cell service online, there is a far greater risk automotive and civilian telemetry meta-data is collected regardless of what people want or do on the ground. It is credulous to believe individuals can affect political policy with gadgets. =3
senorcrab 2mo ago
Nice toys
leetrout 2mo ago
Glad this one is getting the "second chance" bump back to the front page. It's great content and it's timely. It's a great video. If you're not inclined to watch the video I'll save you a click to the youtube description and add a bit more detail than the earlier sibling for the devices shown: Simulacra "Simulacra continuously fabricates a churning crowd of plausible-but-fake wireless devices around you — drowning your real devices in noise so that passive trackers, ALPR add-ons, and co-travel correlators can't reliably pick your signal out of the crowd — while passively watching for the trackers that follow you." https://github.com/Em3ritus/simulacra https://github.com/Em3ritus/simulacra --- Biscuit Ultra "Wardriving Platform: A Full WiFi & BLE Security Toolkit. A headless wireless security research platform controlled entirely from your phone via Bluetooth. The platform supports dual-band WiFi (2.4GHz + 5GHz), Bluetooth Low Energy scanning and attacks, wardriving with GPS mapping, packet capture, and much more" https://biscuitshop.us/products/biscuit-ultra https://biscuitshop.us/products/biscuit-ultra --- Rayhunter "Rayhunter is a project for detecting IMSI catchers, also known as cell-site simulators or stingrays. It was first designed to run on a cheap mobile hotspot called the Orbic RC400L, but thanks to community efforts, it can support some other devices as well." https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter --- OUI Spy "ESP32-S3 multi-mode surveillance-detection board" • Foxhunter — single-target RSSI-proximity tracker for radio direction finding • Detector — multi-target BLE scanner with OUI filtering + web config portal • PCAP — raw 2.4GHz Wi-Fi packet capture, Wireshark-ready (dev branch) • BLE Sniff — raw Bluetooth LE advertising capture, Wireshark-ready (dev branch) • Flock-You — Flock cam detection with GPS wardriving, JSON/CSV/KML export https://colonelpanic.tech/ https://colonelpanic.tech/ https://github.com/colonelpanichacks/oui-spy https://github.com/colonelpanichacks/oui-spy
- NDlurker 2mo ago
  OUI Spy is cool. I got the pair of earrings for my girlfriend's kid's bday a few months ago. It's fun and disappointing driving around finding all the Flock cameras I hadn't noticed.
- gruez 2mo ago
  >"Simulacra continuously fabricates a churning crowd of plausible-but-fake wireless devices around you — drowning your real devices in noise so that passive trackers, ALPR add-ons, and co-travel correlators can't reliably pick your signal out of the crowd — while passively watching for the trackers that follow you." "Oh, it's that guy with the bluetooth spammer." https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/
gourneau 2mo ago
Great video, thanks for posting. Since Meshtastic keeps coming up in the video — if anyone here is heading to Burning Man, there's a dedicated mesh network for the event. I will have a couple nodes running on it :) https://www.burningmesh.org/ https://www.burningmesh.org/
- willis936 2mo ago
  I'd love to know how it does. One of meshcore's claims is that it scales better than meshtastic. The 900 MHz band is limited and herding cats without a shepherd is a hard problem. Music festivals are a good stress test.
  - sitzkrieg 2mo ago
    CSS - chirp spread spectrum is used by both, so likely better software
- warrenmiller 2mo ago
  Cell phone connectivity was the beginning of the end for burning man.
burger_moon 2mo ago
idk if this is off topic or not because its an ad playing on their channel but wow the non-skippable ad about 'clearing out stuck poop fast' from an ai doctor really added a lot of value to my life before the video rolled. this is what I get for not opening in a browser with ad block. is this what youtube looks like now without ads?
- pudgywalsh 2mo ago
  Yes, it's really bad, I see that scam ad constantly. Some even use celebrity deepfakes. Logged-out YouTube ads are 90% garbage like that. Consider yourself lucky you didn't get the outright pornographic ones for boner pills "my husband fucked me 50 times". Reporting them does nothing. Google does not care.
lrvick 2mo ago
The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace. Defcon stopped caring about privacy, hacker ethos, and digital sovereignty a long time ago. Go there if you want to talk to their military recruiters or buy/sell proprietary snake oil security SaaS. It is really just another corpocon at this point. Hackers should probably skip it unless using it as a chance to hang out with friends in vegas on their corporate credit card. The hackers are mostly at HOPE and CCC these days.
- Cider9986 2mo ago
  > The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace. What does this look like in practice?
  - chews 2mo ago
    They have a sign similar to the ones at stadiums or events that say recording is in progress and that by being there you agree to be recorded... being here means you agree... not that there is any enforcement but very flocky and thus ironic.
    - Cider9986 2mo ago
      That's not Google though?
      - lrvick 2mo ago
        You have your choice of salesforce, google, or discord to interact with them. They even virtue signal with their "crypto means cryptography!" sign without actually promoting tools that let people have control of their own keys. They do not use or support any privacy preserving comms, and thus, they are just yet another surveillance capitalism marketing village. I actually encourage Defcon attendees to visit the village with context, as it really is a symbol of everything wrong with privacy advocacy in America, and why we are so so so far behind Europe.
kamranjon 2mo ago
Is anyone familiar with the laws surrounding police basically operating their own pseudo cell towers? I would assume this would be highly illegal for individuals, what sort of hoops did law enforcement need to jump through to get this type of approval? Did FCC need to rubber stamp this?
- Joel_Mckay 2mo ago
  In general, interfering with a radio link can be hundreds of thousands of dollar fines, and years in prison. Almost every RF (legal) communication device consumers own will back off broadcasting if it detects collision or interference. The fact many governments of the past few decades feel entitled to run intelligence campaigns on their own citizens often points to a degenerative despotic trend. The best plans simply don't require secrecy, and everyone has fun. =3
- PaulRobinson 2mo ago
  John Oliver did a piece on this a couple of weeks ago. The videos are not widely available outside of the US, but here's a Guardian write-up [0], and in the UK you can get access to the episode via catch-up if you have Sky Atlantic. TLDR: the police do this whenever they want, pretty much. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/aug/03/john-oliver-police-surveillance-cameras https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/aug/03/john-ol...
  - Joel_Mckay 2mo ago
    In the US, the legality of Flock cameras is complicated. =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmnL_Y9CsI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmnL_Y9CsI0
- strathmeyer 2mo ago
  [dead]
geokon 2mo ago
Ironic to share this using a Google property...
- poopbutt16 2mo ago
  "Yet you still participate in society. Curious!"
fooqux 2mo ago
I'm not sure I understand Simulacra. I get the idea, just spam devices around the area in hopes you're lost in the crowd. But anything designed to track you is purpose built to handle tons of devices moving about. Maybe if everyone had one in their pocket we could overload the surveillance devices, but at best you're just bloating their logs.
- bewareofscams 2mo ago
  Seconding this, plus, the original devices stays always visible to the tracker? Does it really matter if there's your sole device in the range, vs always-present yours + ton of noise?
- em3ritus 1mo ago
  Simulacra is meant to send out signals that look identical to other real signals making it harder to decipher what's real vs what's not. The unique identifiers of those devices show up and never show again once they churn. They have a fresh set of identifiers each time one is produced. Its never going to be perfect but if you can hide the real stuff in a ton of fake stuff it offers a level of obfuscation that otherwise wouldn't be there.
xyzsparetimexyz 2mo ago
Defcon has been nothing but feds and 3 letter agencies for years if not decades. Assume all of these are bypassed
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]

247 points by neom 2mo ago

Partial summary: -ESP32 based device that tries to detect bluetooth/MAC addresses of flock cameras and beeps when it does - a Stingray detector that runs on a second-hand mobile hotspot - a device that alerts you about things that are moving approximately with you (AirTags, SSIDs, etc).

pavel_lishin 2mo ago
> ESP32 based device that tries to detect bluetooth/MAC addresses of flock cameras and beeps when it does Is it this thing? https://simeononsecurity.com/articles/flock-you-detection-project-counter-surveillance-hardware-guide-2026/ https://simeononsecurity.com/articles/flock-you-detection-pr...
- addandsubtract 2mo ago
  Yea, it's the OUI Spy board: https://github.com/colonelpanichacks/oui-spy https://github.com/colonelpanichacks/oui-spy
em3ritus 2mo ago
The last project is this, it actually does a lot more. https://github.com/Em3ritus/simulacra https://github.com/Em3ritus/simulacra
_blk 2mo ago
Cool, I like the esp idea but won't you have to walk fairly slowly with a default ESP antenna? High gain might be better.. If you're wearing a cap you may not care as much being seem from above vs from the front. Maybe attach a little windspeed meter to the top of the antenna on your hat too ;)
Joel_Mckay 2mo ago
Sigh, researchers used to publish cutting edge stuff. That list reads like a fist year lab schedule. lol =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBlAMqoJ5BA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBlAMqoJ5BA
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  It's cutting edge (in the US at least) for citizen activism and individual anti-tracking protection, has to count for something no?
  - Joel_Mckay 2mo ago
    Voting, and participating locally in policy discussions has far greater traction. The fact is with satellite to cell service online, there is a far greater risk automotive and civilian telemetry meta-data is collected regardless of what people want or do on the ground. It is credulous to believe individuals can affect political policy with gadgets. =3

senorcrab 2mo ago

Nice toys

leetrout 2mo ago

Glad this one is getting the "second chance" bump back to the front page. It's great content and it's timely. It's a great video. If you're not inclined to watch the video I'll save you a click to the youtube description and add a bit more detail than the earlier sibling for the devices shown: Simulacra "Simulacra continuously fabricates a churning crowd of plausible-but-fake wireless devices around you — drowning your real devices in noise so that passive trackers, ALPR add-ons, and co-travel correlators can't reliably pick your signal out of the crowd — while passively watching for the trackers that follow you." https://github.com/Em3ritus/simulacra https://github.com/Em3ritus/simulacra --- Biscuit Ultra "Wardriving Platform: A Full WiFi & BLE Security Toolkit. A headless wireless security research platform controlled entirely from your phone via Bluetooth. The platform supports dual-band WiFi (2.4GHz + 5GHz), Bluetooth Low Energy scanning and attacks, wardriving with GPS mapping, packet capture, and much more" https://biscuitshop.us/products/biscuit-ultra https://biscuitshop.us/products/biscuit-ultra --- Rayhunter "Rayhunter is a project for detecting IMSI catchers, also known as cell-site simulators or stingrays. It was first designed to run on a cheap mobile hotspot called the Orbic RC400L, but thanks to community efforts, it can support some other devices as well." https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter --- OUI Spy "ESP32-S3 multi-mode surveillance-detection board" • Foxhunter — single-target RSSI-proximity tracker for radio direction finding • Detector — multi-target BLE scanner with OUI filtering + web config portal • PCAP — raw 2.4GHz Wi-Fi packet capture, Wireshark-ready (dev branch) • BLE Sniff — raw Bluetooth LE advertising capture, Wireshark-ready (dev branch) • Flock-You — Flock cam detection with GPS wardriving, JSON/CSV/KML export https://colonelpanic.tech/ https://colonelpanic.tech/ https://github.com/colonelpanichacks/oui-spy https://github.com/colonelpanichacks/oui-spy

NDlurker 2mo ago
OUI Spy is cool. I got the pair of earrings for my girlfriend's kid's bday a few months ago. It's fun and disappointing driving around finding all the Flock cameras I hadn't noticed.
gruez 2mo ago
>"Simulacra continuously fabricates a churning crowd of plausible-but-fake wireless devices around you — drowning your real devices in noise so that passive trackers, ALPR add-ons, and co-travel correlators can't reliably pick your signal out of the crowd — while passively watching for the trackers that follow you." "Oh, it's that guy with the bluetooth spammer." https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/

gourneau 2mo ago

Great video, thanks for posting. Since Meshtastic keeps coming up in the video — if anyone here is heading to Burning Man, there's a dedicated mesh network for the event. I will have a couple nodes running on it :) https://www.burningmesh.org/ https://www.burningmesh.org/

willis936 2mo ago
I'd love to know how it does. One of meshcore's claims is that it scales better than meshtastic. The 900 MHz band is limited and herding cats without a shepherd is a hard problem. Music festivals are a good stress test.
- sitzkrieg 2mo ago
  CSS - chirp spread spectrum is used by both, so likely better software
warrenmiller 2mo ago
Cell phone connectivity was the beginning of the end for burning man.

burger_moon 2mo ago

idk if this is off topic or not because its an ad playing on their channel but wow the non-skippable ad about 'clearing out stuck poop fast' from an ai doctor really added a lot of value to my life before the video rolled. this is what I get for not opening in a browser with ad block. is this what youtube looks like now without ads?

pudgywalsh 2mo ago
Yes, it's really bad, I see that scam ad constantly. Some even use celebrity deepfakes. Logged-out YouTube ads are 90% garbage like that. Consider yourself lucky you didn't get the outright pornographic ones for boner pills "my husband fucked me 50 times". Reporting them does nothing. Google does not care.

lrvick 2mo ago

The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace. Defcon stopped caring about privacy, hacker ethos, and digital sovereignty a long time ago. Go there if you want to talk to their military recruiters or buy/sell proprietary snake oil security SaaS. It is really just another corpocon at this point. Hackers should probably skip it unless using it as a chance to hang out with friends in vegas on their corporate credit card. The hackers are mostly at HOPE and CCC these days.

Cider9986 2mo ago
> The "Crypto and Privacy" village at Defcon demands you agree to the privacy policies of Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Discord to interact with them. It is a disgrace. What does this look like in practice?
- chews 2mo ago
  They have a sign similar to the ones at stadiums or events that say recording is in progress and that by being there you agree to be recorded... being here means you agree... not that there is any enforcement but very flocky and thus ironic.
  - Cider9986 2mo ago
    That's not Google though?
    - lrvick 2mo ago
      You have your choice of salesforce, google, or discord to interact with them. They even virtue signal with their "crypto means cryptography!" sign without actually promoting tools that let people have control of their own keys. They do not use or support any privacy preserving comms, and thus, they are just yet another surveillance capitalism marketing village. I actually encourage Defcon attendees to visit the village with context, as it really is a symbol of everything wrong with privacy advocacy in America, and why we are so so so far behind Europe.

kamranjon 2mo ago

Is anyone familiar with the laws surrounding police basically operating their own pseudo cell towers? I would assume this would be highly illegal for individuals, what sort of hoops did law enforcement need to jump through to get this type of approval? Did FCC need to rubber stamp this?

Joel_Mckay 2mo ago
In general, interfering with a radio link can be hundreds of thousands of dollar fines, and years in prison. Almost every RF (legal) communication device consumers own will back off broadcasting if it detects collision or interference. The fact many governments of the past few decades feel entitled to run intelligence campaigns on their own citizens often points to a degenerative despotic trend. The best plans simply don't require secrecy, and everyone has fun. =3
PaulRobinson 2mo ago
John Oliver did a piece on this a couple of weeks ago. The videos are not widely available outside of the US, but here's a Guardian write-up [0], and in the UK you can get access to the episode via catch-up if you have Sky Atlantic. TLDR: the police do this whenever they want, pretty much. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/aug/03/john-oliver-police-surveillance-cameras https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/aug/03/john-ol...
- Joel_Mckay 2mo ago
  In the US, the legality of Flock cameras is complicated. =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmnL_Y9CsI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmnL_Y9CsI0
strathmeyer 2mo ago
[dead]

geokon 2mo ago

Ironic to share this using a Google property...

poopbutt16 2mo ago
"Yet you still participate in society. Curious!"

fooqux 2mo ago

I'm not sure I understand Simulacra. I get the idea, just spam devices around the area in hopes you're lost in the crowd. But anything designed to track you is purpose built to handle tons of devices moving about. Maybe if everyone had one in their pocket we could overload the surveillance devices, but at best you're just bloating their logs.

bewareofscams 2mo ago
Seconding this, plus, the original devices stays always visible to the tracker? Does it really matter if there's your sole device in the range, vs always-present yours + ton of noise?
em3ritus 1mo ago
Simulacra is meant to send out signals that look identical to other real signals making it harder to decipher what's real vs what's not. The unique identifiers of those devices show up and never show again once they churn. They have a fresh set of identifiers each time one is produced. Its never going to be perfect but if you can hide the real stuff in a ton of fake stuff it offers a level of obfuscation that otherwise wouldn't be there.

xyzsparetimexyz 2mo ago

Defcon has been nothing but feds and 3 letter agencies for years if not decades. Assume all of these are bypassed

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]