Cats Will Hack Your WiFi

This is not the new plot for Cats & Dogs. We had the suspicions that cats are spies and want to take over the world at some point, but this is becoming reality. They no longer want to take our free times with cute videos, and they no longer want to enter our homes through the power of Internet.

They want our WiFi.

All right, maybe I'm over exaggerating a bit. At Def Con this year Gene Bransfield decided to show us two unique hacking devices. Both of those devices are places on domestic pets - a cat and a dog. We will not talk about Denial of Service Dog. The more important topic here is War Kitteh.

War Kitteh is a piece of technology that can locate your WiFi network and tell the user whether it is protected or not. Bransfield used a Spark Core: WiFi for Everything by Spark Devices and a GPS tracer. This way while the cat goes hunting or just wandering around to mark its territory it can locate all the WiFi networks in its area.

From there the user can see the level of protection on each network. If this gets in the wrong hands, there will be a lot of internet stealing. But the idea behind this project wasn't that sinister. Bransfield wanted to prove a point. Many of the new hotspots he discovered were not even locked. He wants to raise awareness for the people, to make them realise how important it is for the user to protect their networks.

So be careful, you never know what that cat in the backyard is doing. It might be sh*tting in your flowers or hunting mice, but it could be stealing your WiFi.