Hackers' Flying Drone Now Eavesdrops On GSM Phones

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas next week, Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins plan to show the crowd of hackers a year's worth of progress on their Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform, or WASP, the second year Tassey and Perkins have displayed the 14-pound, six-foot-long, six-foot wingspan unmanned aerial vehicle. The WASP, built from a retired Army target drone converted from a gasoline engine to electric batteries, is equipped with an HD camera, a cigarette-pack-sized on-board Linux computer packed with network-hacking tools, including the BackTrack testing toolset and a custom-built 340 million word dictionary for brute-force guessing of passwords, and eleven antennae. On top of cracking Wi-Fi networks, the upgraded WASP now also performs a new trick: impersonating the GSM cell phone towers used by AT&T and T-Mobile to trick phones into connecting to the plane's antenna rather than their carrier, allowing the drone to record conversations and text messages on 32 gigs of storage."

Comments

RC planes will be illegal in

[rbrausse]

3, 2, ....

cool toy, and the rationale "The number one reason we did this was because we were told it wouldn’t be possible” is THE reason why we as mankind are still innovative (okay, "because I can" is similar important)

Doesn't matter to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Sprint customer!

Re:If government was doing this

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

If the government was doing this it would be more than one, wouldn't be demoed to the public, and would be abused by the police to stalk ex-girlfriends. I suspect that in these guys hands it's slightly safer, though all bets are off if News Corp gets their hands on it.

Re:If government was doing this

[houghi]

In the US they do not need one. They have direct access to the towers already. In other countries they already have this.

Remember the specifics that Bin Laden did not use cell phones? The reason this was mentioned was because if he had, they would have been faster in finding him. And how would they have done that? By using what they already have.

This all from the standard 'news' places, so basically a reading of the press releases.

So not only do I think they have it, I know they have it and they told us so.