Smart Collar Turns Your Cat into a WiFi Hacking Weapon

Security engineer Gene Bransfield has developed WarKitteh, a tech-laden collar that turns feline companions into a WiFi-sniffing hacker accomplice. The accessory hides a Spark Core chip loaded with his custom-coded firmware, a Wi-Fi card, a tiny GPS and a battery that maps wireless networks and their vulnerabilities wherever the pet wanders.

Bransfield admits WarKitteh doesn’t represents a substantial security threat. Rather, it’s an experiment in pet-based network penetration that serves as a friendly reminder to lock down your home’s WiFi access point. The engineer discovered that many of his neighbors were using crackable WEP instead of the more modern WPA encryption.

“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,” says Bransfield, who works for the security consultancy Tenacity. “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.”

Source: engadget.com, wired.com

Image Credit: Gene Bransfield