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War Driving Version 2.0
asv108 writes: "There is an interesting article in the New York Times about the popularity of wireless cameras from X10 and how easy it is to easedrop on the feeds with relatively inexpensive equipment from up to a 1/4 mile away." I wonder if they're doing the things the X10 ads imply they might be doing.
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There used to be such a thing as war dialling: setting your modem to call many 800 numbers sequentially, looking for a modem response. Collect the numbers, hack around with em, yada yada yada....
War driving version 1 is about 802.11 (wifi) - people drive around big cities and overhear the traffic broadcast by banks, and so on.
this is v.2
hope that's clear
WarDialing - dialing a large number of phone numbers to see which numbers are to computers.
WarDriving (v1) Driving through communities looking for open 802.11b AccessPoints.
WarDriving (v2) like v1, but looking for X10 cameras.
You never know...
War Driving is the term used from when people would (and still do) drive around with wireless networking equiptment and see how many places' networks they can see/play with along the way.
The term comes from "War Dialing" which is pretty much no longer in practice. It was when phreakers would dial numbers in order until one picked up with a modem answer, kind of like brute force password cracking. Once a modem answered, most of the time people just tinkered with things to see what that particular phone number had in it.
For more information on war dailing, see the movie "War Games" (this is a CLASSIC 'hacker' movie).
I would assume that you do the same thing with X10 stuff, just hook it up to a laptop and drive around until you got a signal. Hence, war driving 2.0.
Find Escorts, Strippers, Massage Parlours, Swingers
Thousands of people who have installed a popular wireless video camera, intending to increase the security of their homes and offices, have instead unknowingly opened a window on their activities to anyone equipped with a cheap receiver.
The wireless video camera, which is heavily advertised on the Internet, is intended to send its video signal to a nearby base station, allowing it to be viewed on a computer or a television. But its signal can be intercepted from more than a quarter-mile away by off-the-shelf electronic equipment costing less than $250.
A recent drive around the New Jersey suburbs with two security experts underscored the ease with which a digital eavesdropper can peek into homes where the cameras are put to use as video baby monitors and inexpensive security cameras.
The rangy young driver pulled his truck around a corner in the well-to-do suburban town of Chatham and stopped in front of an unpretentious home. A window on his laptop's screen that had been flickering suddenly showed a crisp black-and-white video image: a living room, seen from somewhere near the floor. Baby toys were strewn across the floor, and a woman sat on a couch.
After showing the nanny-cam images, the man, a privacy advocate who asked that his name not be used, drove on, scanning other homes and finding a view from above a back door and of an empty crib.
In the nearby town of Madison, from the parking lot of a Staples store, workers could be observed behind the cash register. The driver walked into the Staples and pointed up at a corner of the room. "Take a look," he said. Above the folded-back steel security shutters was a nubbin of technology: a barely perceptible video camera looking down on the employees.
"I can only imagine driving around the Bay Area with one of these," said Aviel D. Rubin, a security researcher at AT&T Labs who was along for the ride.
Around San Francisco, high-technology toys like security cameras are likely to be far more common. Mr. Rubin tries to help the business world recognize security threats and address them. He knows the man with the truck, who brought this latest wrinkle of wireless insecurity to his attention. Although there is no evidence that video snooping is widespread, it is so easy and the opportunity to do it is so great that it is a cause for concern, Mr. Rubin said.
Such digital peeping is apparently legal, said Clifford S. Fishman, a law professor at the Catholic University of America and the author of a leading work on surveillance law, "Wiretapping and Eavesdropping."
When told of the novel form of high-technology prying, Professor Fishman said, "That is astonishing and appalling." But he said that wiretap laws generally applied to intercepting sound, not video. Legal prohibitions on telephone eavesdropping, he said, were passed at the urging of the telecommunications industry, which wanted to ensure that consumers would feel safe using its products. "There's no corresponding lobby out there protecting people from digital surveillance," he said.
Some states have passed laws that prohibit placing surreptitious cameras in places like dressing rooms, but legislatures have generally not considered the legality of intercepting those signals. Nor have they considered that the signals would be intercepted from cameras that people planted themselves. "There's no clear law that protects us," Professor Fishman said. "You put it all together, the implications are pretty horrifying." With no federal law and no consensus among the states on the legality of tapping video signals, Professor Fishman said, "The nanny who decided to take off her dress and clean up the house in her underwear would probably have no recourse" against someone tapping the signal. Police with search warrants could use the technology for investigative purposes, as well, he suggested.
Surveillance has been a growing part of American life, especially since Sept. 11. Video cameras have been installed on city streets, and some cities and airports have tried to tie cameras into facial recognition systems, with mixed results. Privacy activists argue that the benefit to security is questionable and the cost to privacy is high. But the cameras continue to proliferate -- with many people buying them for personal use. Surveillance cameras have also sprouted at intersections to catch drivers who speed or run red lights and as a part of many voyeur-oriented pornographic Web sites.
Ads for the "Amazing X10 Camera" have been popping up all over the World Wide Web for months. The ads for the device, the XCam2, carry a taste of cheesecake -- usually a photo of a glamorous-looking woman in a swimming pool or on the edge of a couch. But, in fact, many people have bought the cameras for far more pedestrian purposes.
"Frankly, a lot of it is kind of dull," and most of the women being surreptitiously observed are probably nannies, said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. He calls the X10 ads "one of the weird artifacts of the Internet age."
The company that sells the cameras, X10 Wireless Technology Inc. of Seattle, was created in 1999 by an American subsidiary of X10 Ltd., a Hong Kong company. It is privately held and does not release sales figures. A spokesman, Jeff Denenholz, said the company had no comment for this article.
Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public stock offering that was later withdrawn provide some figures, however. X10 lost $8.1 million on revenue of $21.3 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2000, and said that 52 percent of its revenue came from wireless camera kits. At the camera's current retail price of about $80, that would translate to sales of more than 138,000 cameras in those nine months alone.
Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Giga Information Group, a technology consulting business, said he was a big fan of X10 -- which sells the most popular wireless cameras on the consumer market -- and its wares. "Theirs is the least expensive option out there, and they actually do a good job," he said.
The one I got from X10 runs at 2.4GHz. These things are like visual CB's or walkietalkies.
All you need is the receiver to pick up a very nice picture and the range is incredible. Its too easy to fashion a crumpled up piece of aluminum foil around the antenna to concentrate the signal for dramatic range increases across the city.
Pass laws against receiving these? That's like banning the receive mode on CB radios. Its pretty much public airspace. Its an anarchy that people need to learn how to use if they want any privacy.
Mr. Enderle was surprised to hear of the cameras' lack of security, but said he did not see a cause for great concern. "Clearly, if you are pointing that at areas like your bathroom or shower, there may be people enjoying that view with you," he said. "But fundamentally, you shouldn't be pointing it that way anyway."
The vulnerability of wireless products has been well understood for decades. The radio spectrum is crowded, and broadcast is an inherently leaky medium; baby monitors would sometimes receive signals from early cordless phones (most are scrambled today to prevent monitoring). A subculture of enthusiasts grew up around inexpensive scanning equipment that could pick up signals from cordless and cellular phones, as former Speaker Newt Gingrich discovered when recordings of a 1996 conference call strategy session were released by Democratic foes.
More recently, with the advent of wireless computer networks based on the increasingly popular technology known as WiFi, yet another new subculture has emerged: people known as "war drivers" who enter poorly safeguarded wireless networks while driving or walking around with laptops.
In the case of the XCam2, the cameras transmit an unscrambled analog radio signal that can be picked up by receivers sold with the cameras. Replacing the receiver's small antenna with a more powerful one and adding a signal amplifier to pick up transmissions over greater distances is a trivial task for anyone who knows his way around a RadioShack and can use a soldering iron.
Products designed for the consumer market rarely include strong security, said Gary McGraw, the chief technology officer of Cigital, a software risk management company. That is because security costs money, and even pennies of added expense eat into profits. "When you're talking about a cheap thing that's consumer grade that you're supposed to sell lots and lots of copies of, that really matters," he said.
Refitting an X10 camera with encryption technology would be beyond the skills of most consumers. It is best for manufacturers to design security features into products from the start, because adding them after the fact is far more difficult, Mr. McGraw said. The cameras are only the latest example of systems that are too insecure in their first versions, he said, and cited other examples, including Microsoft's Windows operating system. "It's going to take a long time for consumer goods to have any security wedged into them at all," he said.
Another wireless camera, the DCS-1000W from D-Link Systems Inc., does offer encrypted transmission and ties into standard WiFi networks -- but it costs at least $350.
As a security expert, Mr. Rubin said he was concerned about the kinds of mischief that a criminal could carry out by substituting one video image for another. In one scenario, a robber or kidnapper wanting to get past a security camera at the front door could secretly record the video image of a trusted neighbor knocking. Later, the robber could force that image into the victim's receiver with a more powerful signal. "I have my computer retransmit these images while I come by," he said, explaining the view of a would-be robber.
Far-fetched, perhaps. That is the way security experts think. But those who use the cameras and find out about the security hole seem to grasp the implications quickly.
Back at the Staples store in Madison, employees said they did not know that they were being watched by security monitors. The manager of the store, when asked whether he knew that his cameras were broadcasting to the outside world, seemed somewhat shaken, and excused himself to go into his office, he said, to put down the small display carousel he was carrying.
He did not return.
that's not encrypted can be intercepted. Just like scanning for cordless phones, this is not really that hard. If you don't want someone to see/hear personal information you're transmitting, ENCRYPT it! Of course, most consumers either don't know enough about encryption to use it or just don't care. Then again, if you've ever gotten bored and scanned the wireless phone frequencies you know how inane and boring most conversations are. I'm betting the average "nanny-cam" would be just as boring :)
Or you could just order a reciever from X10 for $49. Maybe he was buying the 6 camera pack with eagle eye motion sensors and the auto vcr kit for the $250.
If you order from X10, what ever you do, make sure you give them a disposable e-mail address because they will send you so much spam, you will long for the days when all you received was viagra and porn e-mails.
-Bingo
...with out registering with The New York Times:
8 &ncid=68&e=1&u=/nyt/20020413/ts_nyt/nanny_cam_may_ leave_a_home_exposed
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=6
Orange
Here's How XCam2 Works, and
X10 cameras and Video Senders use the following frequencies: 2.411GHz, 2.434GHz, 2.453GHz, 2.473GHz. So something like this (the Icom IC-R3) might work, as it can quickly scan the frequencies you're looking for and lock on one once a signal is found.
Also, from the XCam2 manual: "Refer to the setup and operating instructions that came with the 2.4 GHz Video Receiver, Model VR31A or
VR36A (sold separately) to set up the Receiver.". In other words, one only needs to buy said on of the suggested receivers for $50-$90 and scan those four channels manually.
The R3 is an all-band receiver with built-in video, and can receive broadcast TV, ATV, and wireless video, including 900Mhz and 2.4Ghz transmissions.
Unfortunately, the 2.4Ghz range only covers three of the four XCAM frequencies, and the receiver is deaf as a post above 2Ghz, even with a good antenna.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.