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A Cheap Spying Tool With a High Creepy Factor
- cliveowen 13y agoUnencrypted data sent through public wi-fi can be snooped on, that's as new as sliced bread.
- patrickaljord 13y agoDon't despair, something great could come out of this article. A representative could read it, freak out and propose a bill that would ban raspberry-pi and regulate the hell out of the booming open hardware industry.
- walshemj 13y agoyou think the competitors of the Pi in the US are not doing this all ready. There is a lot of NIH in the comments about the pi on HN and ./
- thejosh 13y agoSee also: snoopy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsn7_4qUdwk&feature=youtu.be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsn7_4qUdwk&feature=youtu.be
- tankenmate 13y agoThe article also mentions that Weev exploited a security hole in AT&T's servers; a complete misunderstanding and/or misrepresentation of the truth.
- anotherhue 13y agoThis is a collection of media buzz words strung together to create an article, it's about as insightful as claiming that network analysers can spy on network data. I wonder why he only used one pi per channel though, I think they have the horsepower to sniff perhaps three.
- nwh 13y agoThe USB power is very very low with them. Even one is pushing it reall, any more would need a bulky powered hub.
- icebraining 13y agoSince the Pi takes 5V just like any USB device, he could re-use the same power adapter and just get a splitter USB cable; he didn't need a full blown powered USB with its own power adapter.
- Spearchucker 13y agoThis reminds me of the comment from the NSA a while ago in which it said that Snowden's documents have already changed many people's behaviour. I'm on a reliable 4G network in London and (mostly) only go to places I'm familiar with. The result being that location service, WiFi, Bluetooth and NFC are permanently turned off. My girlfriend has had location services turned off since she first got an iPhone 3GS. And she won't let me use my Kinect when she's home. Justified or not, these things are coming up in conversation at work and with friends a lot lately, which I find encouraging.
- hnriot 13y agoWhy? The 4g network is tracking you via cell town triangulation the whole time anyway. Might as well use the phones wifi when you can save some bandwidth on the slower cellular network.
- Spearchucker 13y agoBecause GSM, GPS and WiFi combined are, bar GPS, more accurate and pervasive together than any one in isolation. Also because when location services are off, photos don't get tagged with my location coordinates, and apps can't use my location either.
- jodrellblank 13y agoLocation services are configurable per-app in iOS 6, so you can have Maps allowed to use them and Camera forbidden. (Settings -> Privacy -> Location).
- Spearchucker 13y agoAndroid can do that too, I believe. I have a Windows Phone. Settings aren't that granular.
- wnesensohn 13y ago
- brianbreslin 13y agoSomething we aren't noticing is, if he can build one that small with off the shelf parts, the NSA could and probably does have devices like these as small as quarters or perhaps embedded in dummy iPhone charging cubes. I would bet the Feds can build out miniature versions for a few hundred bucks a piece. Which in defense dollars means they are disposable.
- tomjen3 13y agoScrew unsecured wifi - most peoples wifi is encrypted, these days (at least around here). I wonder how secure 3g connections are? Because it would seem to one could get a lot more information out of those. Edit: speling
- rickyc091 13y agoWhile I didn't attend this talk, someone mentioned that there was a talk at Defcon where 3g networks were being sniffed. https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-21/dc-21-speakers.html https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-21/dc-21-speakers.html Do-It-Yourself Cellular IDS "For less than $500, you can build your own cellular intrusion detection system to detect malicious activity through your own local femtocell. Our team will show how we leveraged root access on a femtocell, reverse engineered the activation process, and turned it into a proof-of-concept cellular network intrusion monitoring system. We leveraged commercial Home Node-Bs (""femtocells"") to create a 3G cellular network sniffer without needing to reimplement the UMTS or CDMA2000 protocol stacks. Inside a Faraday cage, we connected smartphones to modified femtocells running Linux distributions and redirected traffic to a Snort instance. Then we captured traffic from infected phones and showed how Snort was able to detect and alert upon malicious traffic. We also wrote our own CDMA protocol dissector in order to better analyze CDMA traffic."
- siddboots 13y agoCan anyone give a technical account of how this is achieved? The article makes it sound as though it relies on unsecured wifi data, but also states that "Even when he didn’t connect to a Wi-Fi network, his sensors could track his location through Wi-Fi “pings.”" It also talks about iMessage, and dropbox, and other application layer data. I couldn't make sense of it.
- asmithmd1 13y agoiPhones are very "chatty" when not connected to a WiFi access point. They repeatedly try to find access points they have connected to before - broadcasting both their MAC address and the SSID of prior access points. Android phones are completely silent even with the WiFi on when not connected to an access point.
- voltagex_ 13y agoI don't think they'll be silent any more unless you turn off 4.3's "Allow scanning by services" option.
- sangnoir 13y agoThey'll still be silent: "Allow scanning by services" is listen-only with no transmission.
- rickyc091 13y agoYep, this is a good explanation of it. Another thing he mentioned was that even if you have VPN enabled, the first few pings from dropbox, iMessage, etc. actually aren't getting sent through the VPN.
- jonpierce 13y agoPresumably, the location tracking is just a variant of the Wi-Fi-based positioning systems commonly used today. Whereas the system is normally used to provide a device with its location, here it's used to track the device's location. This requires having a network of Wi-Fi access points sharing data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system
- noonespecial 13y agoIts awesome that Pi's are finding their way into stuff like this but its still a tiny bit of round hole, square peg. You could do it for 1/2 the price with a TP-Link TL-WR703N and OpenWRT. Lots of these types of projects are already install-and-go ready for OpenWRT.
- zokier 13y agoIndeed, like the somewhat well-known "WiFi Pineapple": http://hackaday.com/2013/04/29/wifi-pineapple-project-uses-updated-hardware-for-man-in-the-middle-attacks/ http://hackaday.com/2013/04/29/wifi-pineapple-project-uses-u...
- threedaymonk 13y agoHaving done some hacking with those little TP-Link devices (well, on a TL-MR3020, which is almost identical), I will say that Debian on a Raspberry Pi is much easier to work with than OpenWRT on a TL-. With the TL- devices, you have very limited writeable storage, and as it's an append-only file system, the only way to reclaim the space is to reflash the system. A Pi, by comparison, feels like a normal computer system. Twice the price isn't necessarily a bad deal, unless you're working in such volume that development time is an insignificant part of the overall project cost. Given the choice, I'd go for a Raspberry Pi next time.
- coin 13y agoWhy do sites like this go out of their way to disable pinchzoom? Why remove useful functionality?
- cupcake-unicorn 13y agoI think the author of this article doesn't really understand the technology behind packet sniffing, open wifi, what packets iPhones are sending, etc. The article makes it sound like somehow this "device" (really just a computer - a Raspberry Pi) is somehow some special technology that people should watch out for. When I can do all of these things on any laptop on an open network. And in fact, that's going to be less attention grabbing in a cafe than some mysterious black box under a table. It's a shame that the take away message wasn't that any open network is a security risk, not just when someone happens to have one of these "gadgets", but anyone on the network with a laptop can do the same thing.
- jodrellblank 13y agoThe point is not "your phone/tablet network traffic can be overheard", the point is "it can be overheard and uniquely identified, therefore anyone putting cheap access points around your area can track which ones you go near, and when".
- b0z0 13y agoDefinitely not even necessary to buy all that equipment. My friend and I do this with Wireshark on his laptop all the time.
- rickyc091 13y agoYeah, wireshark can definitely sniff the network, but he was trying to point out that for $57 you can make ten of these and plug it in to empty outlets around the city, hotels, cafes, etc. and it would record data and send it back to a server.... Now imagine the government placed these nodes everywhere... they would basically have a fixed GPS on you.
- x0054 13y agoWhen they mention a wifi unique identifier do they mean a MAC address?
- readme 13y agoHow would these boxes pick up 3g/4g traffic? Also, to pick up WiFi wouldn't the communications have to be unencrypted?
- wikiburner 13y agoHe said "public wifi". That gave me a bit of a jolt too at first. I wonder if there are any known instances of someone monitoring and collecting a high value target's encrypted home wifi (say a CEO before earnings, or someone at the department of labor) with the goal of cracking it.