Posted on 08/05/2011 7:25:52 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Wireless drone sniffs Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, phone signals
By: Declan McCullagh August 4, 2011 11:19 AM PDT
LAS VEGAS--Forget Wi-Fi war driving. Now it's war flying.
A pair of security engineers showed up at the Black Hat security conference here to show off a prototype that can eavesdrop on Wi-Fi, phone, and Bluetooth signals: a retrofitted U.S. Army target drone, bristling with electronic gear and an array of antennas.
"Nobody's really looking at this from a threat perspective," said Mike Tassey, a security consultant who works for the U.S. government intelligence community. "There's some pretty evil stuff you can do from the sky."
The term war driving, meaning searching for Wi-Fi networks from a moving vehicle, was coined approximately a decade ago, of course (here's a CNET article from 2002). But aerial drones can gain access to places that might be off-limits to vehicles--and, in theory, can follow a moving signal surreptitiously from above.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.cnet.com ...
Any way to hijack this baby (remotely) and use it as my own?
interesting.
There’s gotta be a way to spam-ping/etc. this through backtrack.
Now we have another clue in playing Spot the Fed: look for the guy with the RC controller.
This oughta take care of that. ;)
Of course, it does. Costs a lot, though.:-)
Might be possible to foil drones (at least those high enough to be “surreptitious”) through antenna systems that have a sharp cutoff at relatively low angles of azimuth (if I have the right word for the angle with respect to the horizontal). The spying drone would at best have to stay well off the vertical from the spyee subject. At worst it would find the signal cut off by buildings, trees, landscaping etc.
Azimuth is my mistake, sorry. Altitude (expressed in spherical coordinates as an angle, not as a linear distance).
Elevation is the preferred word, I think. Excellent idea.
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