How to Use Your Cat to Hack Your Neighbor’s Wi-Fi | Hacker News Reader

How to Use Your Cat to Hack Your Neighbor’s Wi-Fi

wired.com

113 pointsklunger76 comments

1. Make the collar hijack any wifi devices it can and use their CPUs to mine dogecoin

2. Use earnings to create more collars, attaching them to stray dogs

3. Revel in your stray doge empire

"Honey! This stray dog has a USB drive attached to its collar, maybe its information about the owner, plug it into your PC and see."

The evilness just makes me shudder. Next up a USB stick that has a rat treat in it, when you push the stick into a USB port that pops the rat treat out of the top. You train a bunch of rats and then leave the USB sticks around your target's facility.

There are some fun fiction ideas in there, that is for sure.

I can imagine the morning news channels shouting out, "Experts say, don't let stray animals into your house, they may contain viruses. Several home owners say they've been infected with the lucrative HazCheeseburger virus."

so profit!

Sounds like... http://www.jose-dogs-the-best-for-to-find-wifi.net/

Amazing, I was totally fooled

I leave my wifi open because I like being a nice neighbor. A little QoS and a firewall for my home network, and you're free to connect.

I don't. I put the password in the SSID, as a form of a captcha. Any marginally intelligent human would break it, but an automated system sniffing out unprotected wifi won't.

I've always wondered if leaving your WiFi open gives you plausible deniability WRT to torrenting copyrighted material (should anyone ever come knocking).

AFAIK it's always been one of the bigger gray areas regarding pirating copyrighted material. From what I've read it's still a "we have no formal proof that people are prosecuted based on it, but we also have no proof that they aren't/can't be".

Also, read https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wirel... as linked below in this thread.

It is from 2008 though, things have changed. Just today a domain was seized by the UK govt on grounds of copyright infringement just because it was running a proxy. In Austria someone was convicted for running a Tor exit node about a month ago.

I doubt it makes a difference. Just having some server logs and an IP isn't really sufficient proof in the first place. Just because web requests come from my IP doesn't mean that I made those requests (it could be a friend, relative, hacker).

Computer forensics would be required to link the requests to a specific computer and person. Your ISP is probably still free to just ban you though.

If a murder weapon is found in your house, you're going to have a really hard time explaining that "I was just holding it for a friend."

Just sayin' ...

That's a terrible analogy. Courts in the US have been widely rejecting IPs as the basis of copyright lawsuits, see:

http://www.gamepolitics.com/2014/03/25/florida-judge-rejects...

http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/security/297475-ip-address-no...

http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/10/court_nukes_ano...

P.S. Downvotes on HN do not mean "I disagree".

I think the EFF has been pushing this idea recently.

They have, but it only concerns the USA, completely ignoring the rest of the world while still calling on everyone to open their networks. Understandable as they're an American organization, but annoying as a non-American. Almost as annoying as the NSA considering anyone with a non-American IP address a potential terrorist.

And you're free to sniff my traffic and hack my phone :) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8151516>

What if your neighbors (or anyone else) look up something illegal on your Wi-Fi?

I am interested in building a device like this (for other purposes and not for cats), but I have no idea how to put the hardware together or where to start. I have been thingking about bycicle security a lot lately and a tiny GPS + X (gsm, wifi, etc.) might me useful.

Could someone point me in the right direction? Where do I start?

I love this thing. full computer, i.e. install ubuntu and go, yet it's way smaller and more powerful than a raspberry pi.

https://store.gumstix.com/index.php/products/620/

the problem you will run into is wifi eats a lot of power and makes a lot of heat

Thanks, I will have a look at it!

OT: Actually a useful device for cats would be a collar that tracks GPS location and answers its location when pinged. Then they can be easier found and won't get lost.

I think there are issues. Radios need quite a lot of power, while batteries must be very light and compact to not bother the cat (otherwise a collar would be eventually removed - a cat will surely find a way to do so)

I'm really surprised the cat in the article didn't tear off the collar on the first occasion.

Outdoor cats generally don't really get lost, they get flattened by cars or eaten by coyotes depending upon where you live, neither of which a GPS is going to help with. On rare occasions they get snatched up by animal control.

For anyone with a cat, I highly recommend getting it microchipped (in case they get out and happen to fall into that last category) and making it indoor-only. The average lifespan of an outdoor cat is ~3-6 years.

About a year ago our cats went from free-range to contained. We now have a contained outdoor area for them which I’ve dubbed the “cat terrarium” as it is outside my office window so I get to watch them prowl while I’m working. Photos and design explanation here: http://www.michevan.id.au/content/cat-terrarium/

A year later it has worked pretty well. I had to put some more netting along the bottom of the fence when the neighbour moved a garden bed on their side of the fence which opened up a gap they could get through. But apart from that, their escapes have always been via a door left open too long, not via the terrarium.

I really need to set up some more toys and stuff for them out there sometime. Any ideas?

I'm pleased to hear this advice, we got a cat a year ago and she has been indoor-only since we got her. We do let her out on a harness with us alongside to sniff around outdoors, and she loves it (and is sad to return inside). I feel somewhat vindicated in making her indoor-only.

That's awesome that you bring her out on a harness. I wish my cat would let me do that, but she won't; she's pretty anxious in general (adopted her when she was 2 and she had been in the shelter twice already) and still has a lot of issues (she's very loving/lovable, but very afraid of strangers, especially males).

Her anxiousness stops her from wanting to run off though, which is really, really rare for a cat, so I hang out with her on the deck in front of my place a lot so she can be "outside" but in a safe way and she doesn't leave the deck area (prior to her I wouldn't have believed this of any cat, because I grew up with some cats and all of them would attempt to run out if given the chance).

IMO indoor cats can have a perfectly fulfilled life if their owners put in some effort (regularly engage them in play that uses their built-in-hunting instincts, mine loves to chase laser pointers and play with a bird feather on a string thing, the one I use is called "Da Bird", but I'm sure other brands exist).

Someone thought of that: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/retrievor-self-charging-g...

I wouldn't bet on them actually delivering, but who knows.

Train a small animal such as a ferret to hit the WPS button on any popular access point and let it loose in their home?

No need when there is Reaver: https://code.google.com/p/reaver-wps/

Am I the only one seeing this?

http://www.imgur.com/ukYNQFL.png

Makes the article totally unreadable on chro.a beta for android (nexus 5)

I didn't see that problem. http://virtivia.com:27080/1omz54cqhj8ms.png

Just use unencrypted wifi but do anything that matters over a good VPN. Assume you can't trust your ISP and local network anyway. All this moaning about wifi security doesn't make sense to me.

This requires you to trust the VPN, though.

And your VPN's ISP

I wanted to trust my ISP. Then they inserted an ad when I was browsing HN.

I changed their domain in my hosts file to localhost, changed dns and started looking into vpn.

It might be worth naming and shaming the ISP, so others can avoid it, if you are sure that it was definitely them and not some form of local malware infection, especially if you have some sort of evidence recorded from the incident (or can collect some by repeating it).

I'm from Mexico so it might not be as useful but my ISP is Cablevision. The only proof I've got is that it was an iframe inserted into non related pages from their server and for a specific offer they were making. I really doubt it was any form of local malware.

s/Related/outdated/

I'd rather not keep on receiving DMCA notices from my ISP because my neighbors refuse to stop torrenting Game of Thrones the day it comes out.

A password on my wifi isn't to protect my traffic, it is to keep obnoxious neighbors from simply using my connection.

What a beautiful cat

This is relevant! If the cat is hideous, it will not be accepted by your neighbor and invited in for tuna. Step one to covert espionage!

What about level of non ionizing radiation the cat is exposed to? Cats head is always in near field of antenna, seems a bit harsh to the cat.

1. it's a WiFi client, in other words, mostly receiver.

2. even if it were an AP, transmitting at max power for hours, it would give out very limited power (zero, give or take measurement errors).

3. you're starting from assumption "wifi baaaad" without anything to support that claim; if it were a nuclear device, I'd see a cause for concern. [citation-sorely-needed] for this assumption.

You know wifi operates in the microwave band, right? Microwave ovens operate in the 2.4 GHz band. Wifi is limited to 1 W total power output, but it's not nothing.

Edit: More to the point, it's a good question, even if the answer is "no."

Indeed: 1 W is the legal _maximum_ as per FCC rules, part 15. Not even all APs are broadcasting at this power level, this is a WiFi client (meaning that it's only transmitting a few milliseconds out of a second), and this is several orders of magnitude below the power levels used by microwaves. In other words, it is "nothing" for the purpose of cooking your cat's brain.

This would be "guilt by association: microwave ovens will cook your brains if inserted, therefore anything else using microwaves will, too, no matter what the power."

Edit: I see that you didn't mean the question rhetorically - so yes, while this may be a valid concern in the design phase, the total exposure is infinitesimal, even in prolonged use.

It's not "association". Wifi literally is microwaves. They're just not very strong ones.

He's not talking about wifi's association to microwaves, he's talking about microwaves' association to microwave ovens, and the implication that anything else using microwaves will have a similar effect.

The electrons flowing through a AA battery are literally the same thing you get out of a 240V appliance outlet, but nobody worries about zapping themselves to death just because the battery makes an electric current.

There is nothing special about the use of 2.4 GHz for ovens. It is just where the regulations arbitrarily put that particular ISM band. Microwave ovens can work on 900 MHz as well.

It is chosen somewhat arbitrarily, but it's not completely random: see e.g. http://www.schoolphysics.co.uk/age16-19/Wave%20properties/Wa...

Sure. And wearing a 900MHz one around your neck probably isn't a good idea either.

Based on what?

It gets warm.

WiFi APs do not have a power output of zero. Think about it for a minute, it makes no sense whatsoever.

"Zero, give or take measurement errors." As related to the GP's assumption "seems a bit harsh to the cat" - in other words, "why are you microwaving your cat, you monster!!111!", not as related to data transfer.

Edited to add the direct quote.

"Zero, give or take measurement errors." Still does not make any sense. It's completely wrong.

That wasn't an assumption, that was the question.

Oh, okay, that makes sense; I have misread it as a rhetorical question, then.

The answer is "no, your cat won't get its brains cooked, not even after prolonged exposure" - there's not even enough juice in the battery to do that :)

Maybe I should have a stern talk with our cat about his health - he likes to sleep on the wifi box as it's nice and warm.

So far the only ways we've found to block the cat also block the wifi.

Also, the device is probably passive, sniffing and logging, but not sending anything. Why would it?

Thanks for the comments. I am not familiar with WiFi protocol, so I didn't know about amount of time/power antenna spends receiving/transmitting, and how the sniffing works (ie it seems to be entirely passive operation?). My karma has gone to hell ;P

There's really no reason to be concerned about that.

I'd be significantly more worried(ie: actually worried) about a mishap with that gumstick cell, which looks like it could be(edit: probably is) a lipo.

A battery on fire could not only hurt the cat, but could also set on fire wherever the cat decided to run to in a wild panic.

Watch out for those chemtrails you nut.

This is a bit of a stretch. Chemtrails are a baseless assumption. EM radiation has a measurable effect matter. Why not make valid points instead of insulting people?

Non-Ionizing radiation means exactly that.

http://www.hpa.org.uk/webw/HPAweb&Page&HPAwebAutoListName/Pa...

Non-ionizing radiation can still be harmful.

That said, the power levels emitted by wifi devices are so far below any safe exposure limits that it's laughable.

Non-ionizing radiation has biological effects. Magnetic fields have biological effects. This is not controversial! Many replicated experiments prove it!

I am not going to say Wifi causes cancer because I don't know (doubt it). But this reflexive bleating about non-ionizing radiation needs to stop. Radio waves do not have to break DNA to affect biological tissues. They can alter many important chemical reactions.

You could say the same thing about a summer breeze. They have biological effects too.

Your point being? I dare say spending most of each day out in a continuous breeze might have some noteworthy effects. Skin disease?

Something having biological effects proves absolutely nothing.

Non-ionizing radiation has biological effects. Magnetic fields have biological effects. This is not controversial!

So?

Also, if you are worried that spending a lot of time "exposed" to a light breeze is going to give you skin disease, you might want to read about hypochondria because you have it.

How big is the battery, and how long does it last? That'll put a firm upper bound (and, I imagine, a quite small one) on how much energy the cat could be absorbing from this.

Non-ionizing seems like a safe level.

Do you use a mobile phone?

the difference is in the wavelength. cell signals are designed to cut through water, so that you can use them when it rains. wifi signals are designed purposely to be absorbed by water (thus limiting their range to reduce interference). your brain is full of water

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