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DARPA Funding a $50 Drone-Droppable Spy Computer
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Shmoocon security conference, researcher Brendan O'Connor plans to present the F-BOMB, or Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors. Built from just the disassembled hardware in a commercially-available PogoPlug mini-computer, a few tiny antennae, eight gigabytes of flash memory and some 3D-printed plastic casing, the F-BOMB serves as 3.5"-by-4"-by-1" spy computer. With a contract from DARPA, O'Connor has designed the cheap gadgets to be spy nodes, ready to be dropped from a drone, plugged inconspicuously into a wall socket, (one model impersonates a carbon monoxide detector) thrown over a barrier, or otherwise put into irretrievable positions to quietly collect data and send it back to the owner over any available Wi-Fi network. O'Connor built his prototypes with gear that added up to just $46 each, so sacrificing one for a single use is affordable."
But what happened to using cockroaches as the spies of the future?
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
I drop F-bombs all the time, at a considerably cheaper cost.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
They respond unfavorably to being impacted by a presidential shoe.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Is it normal for a warzone to have functioning WiFi?
If you really want to break the enemy send them a Nintendo Wii.
They're calling it the F-BOMB? Fuck that.
"over any available Wi-Fi network."
In cities this may not be a problem (though who runs an unencrypted Wifi AP in the city?!!?!?) but in rural areas I suspect WIFI may be hard to come by. It needs a better backup.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
on TV will the FCC fine me?
Do you have ESP?
So does the spy listening to the audio signal coming in from the cockroach.
Once said, the next World War will be conducted with Nuclear weapons, the one following will be conducted with sticks and stones.
Looks like things are playing out a bit different.
The next World War to be conducted over networks by millions of tiny spybots?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"over any available Wi-Fi network."
In cities this may not be a problem (though who runs an unencrypted Wifi AP in the city?!!?!?) but in rural areas I suspect WIFI may be hard to come by. It needs a better backup.
So avoid AT&T territory...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I hope we never meet. People who build stuff for the military are not welcome here. No, it's not cool that "one of us" gets DARPA funding. Security researcher? Arms dealer!
They might be great against an adversary that knows they're being actively surveilled or to gather data in real time, but there's nothing covert about this. You're not going to see them dropping these on targets of interest that they want to remain unaware that they're being watched.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Pretty easy on my brother's farm- there are loads of places where we have NO cell signals at all.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The article doesn't say, but I suspect the computer is Raspberry Pi. Throw in a cellphone-based modem, camera, and microphone and you've got yourself a spy.
The article had a pic of one disguised within a Carbon Monoxide Detector. That's not exactly a form-factor that could be deliverable by a drone, or is a drone the new DARPA employee?
I wouldn't mind doing some shady activities to get the attention of DARPA, and they can install one of these discreetly in my easy-chair and I'll induct enough electrical disturbance so they bring me another couple and I'll flash them together so I can run some shells for wget to point at their website endlessly like what LOIC does. I wonder if maybe their software runs like Tivo and I don't even need to replace all their shit but maybe just spawn another shell to run what I want and cripple their ssh/telnet and top and ps console tools to not show my wget process on the tasklist. hmmm, endless posibilities.
I recently started a similar project based on the $23 TPLink TL-WR703N travel router. Without any need for soldering or other "hardware hacking" you can build a battery-operated network drop box running OpenWrt linux.
http://www.minipwner.com/
There is a serial interface on the circuit board for the WR703N but you have to crack the box and do some soldering to connect to it. I've been toying with the idea to do just that to interface it with an arduino/parallax processor or sensors or whatever. I'm also playing with connecting a USB sound card and adding a microphone to record audio in the local range of the box.
Is it normal for a warzone to have functioning WiFi?
Sure, just like it's normal to take things that drop out of the sky and plug them into the wall.
Well, if they're USB 3.0, sure.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Can you build a Beowulf cluster if a B52 carpet bombs you with these?
How big is a 3g module? Does the enemy sell prepaid sim-cards by mail-order to foreign lands or could we do roaming? At least we could use this thing with 3g in our country against our citizens...
Seriously, though (and I didn't rtfa), wouldn't one want to ruggedize the board itself and not go with an off-the-shelf plug computer?
And as for great firewalls and government control of the internet and such, they could load it with FreedomBox (sooner or later) to have it use TOR and mesh networking (later) and stuff. Possibly at least as ironic as any of the examples in that song...
It's like ra-e-ain
on your wedding day
It's the wo-o-orld bully
using freedombox to oppress you
isn't ironic, don't you think?
Flood the market of the target country with modified cheap cell phones that include this capability hidden inside. Presto, involuntary Spy Nation! Maybe so US cell carriers have some experience that they could share here with the technology.
The higher ups in such countries will want to have contraband high-end smart phones. Stuff 'em with all kinds of spy goodies, including a remotely activated battery bomb. When some particularly nasty critter answers the phone, relieve him of the weight on his shoulders.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I thought the whole point of bugging someone (spy wise, not by repeatedly poking them in the arm) was that they would not know about it.
Any monkey with a $25 Ralink adapter and a copy of Backtrack can pretty much uncover/uncloak and record just about any Wifi network out there. Yeah, it might be WPA2 encrypted, but there's nothing stopping you from figuring out where the source is or determining the presence of an unidentified emitter. I personally mapped out my entire house, and using a set of coloured heat maps I can practically draw a radius around an emission point to determine where my neighbours APs are located within their houses. So if my smoke alarm or CO2 detector was emitting an 802.11 compliant signal, I'd know about it. And you can be damned sure that- if that unit didn't explicitly market a Wifi feature- I'd take it out on the driveway and go Office Space on its ass.
This whole project reeks of another off-the-shelf military project, actually. I don't think they're using Wifi because they have to, but rather because it's cheap and you can get lots of cheap parts to build stuff with that happen to run on 802.11. Reminds me of an article I read once about a fairly hefty piece of military equipment. Some dude found some robotic parts in a warehouse, and wanted to know what they came off of because of the strange controls associated with the HID portion of what he bought. When he traced it back and found some more equipment from the same project for sale, among those things was a friggin' WRT54G Linksys router with a few cables soldered to it for remote status LEDs.
But I'm sure the defence contractor is charging a couple million for a lame idea and $30 worth of parts.
-AC
If you drop it from a drone? Some retard is going to say oh, look a free carbon monoxide detector. I need to plug this into my mud hut next to my poppy field, how convenient! If you have to have them plugged in, why not just send them with the troops?
If we can make tracking devices that we use on whales, sharks, bears, etc, that are self powered, unobtrusive to the animal, and auto-upload to satellite or base station, we have to rely on some twerp plugging in the device -and- for free WiFi to be available for a military device? Pshaw.
And people complain about dropping DARPA funding. With idiotic projects like this we damn sure should.
Silence is a state of mime.
Why not just drop $1.00 thumb drives loaded with spying software? 95% of the folks that find them will simply plug them into their computers (home or work) and "you're in".
>Seriously, though (and I didn't rtfa), wouldn't one want to ruggedize the board itself and not go with an off-the-shelf plug computer?
Go ahead and read the article, we will wait.......
The article talks about a number of different things, wall-wart style from the plug computer that an insider can park in a broom closet, to the innocuous looking useful device (gas leak detector, smoke alarm) that you hope to dupe some local into picking up and plugging in.
The story also talked about AA battery powered devices which would just be tossed into the shrubbery or air dropped. Realistically these would never have enough battery power to last long enough to crack even basic wifi encryption, let alone transfer any meaningful amount of data. Probably intended to last just long enough for dumping a worm or virus onto the local wifi.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It seems the real use of these would be domestic spying where wifi is more likely available. Even more likely is eventually equipping them with 3g or 4g. This would be usable in the US where for a fee they could get a wireless company or two to cooperate.
If I were ever impaneled on a jury and this sort of thing were submitted as evidence by the prosecution and the defendant were "majority", nullification.
I am WHITE
I eat PORK
I own PROPERTY
How DARE you treat those like me and those as one would the enemy for the sake of buying crude petroleum and selling Treasuries!
Okay, first, can we stop naming things so they'll come out with acronyms that mean funny things? As founder of the Society That Ostensibly Pushes Termination of Hilarious Atrocities Today, or S.T.O.P. T.H.A.T., I can tell you we work diligently to bring this kind of nonsense to a halt. Why can't the government come up with better names like in the old days, with Carnivore and Echelon, Blackhawk, and the Thud?
Second... how is that made from parts from a mini-computer? A Mini-computer is the size of a fridge. Have we forgotten that, and so now the microcomputer is just the computer, and now the "mini-computer" is the new, even smaller than a microcomputer? So I guess soon, they'll have computers you can fit into the gemstone setting on a ring, and they'll call THOSE microcomputers. This is particularly a shame because I was looking forward to nanocomputers, picocomputers, and femptocomputers. But I guess we're just going to keep reusing computer, mini-computer, and microcomputer.
Sad.
power is always a problem
Plug-in GSM modules can be had for $50 new (plus SIM card).
Who's to say it would not be capable of cracking WEP, etc. to get access to encrypted APs? It seems that the encryption on many APs is (reasonably) crackable these days.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
Our government is teaching the world, and eventually we will have infinitely cheap spybots patrolling the planet. You wont even know which ones belong to which government.
Electronic parts falling from the sky. It sounds like hacker manna. My first thought was actually that they could throw these in a melting pot and get some metals out of them; but I suspect you'd need way too many for it to be worth it.
because of SSID and passwords.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
> Built from just the disassembled hardware in a ... mini-computer, ... the F-BOMB serves as 3.5"-by-4"-by-1" spy computer.
>
I don't think the summary author knows what it means.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I'm glad they used the most modern technology to make something more fugly and less rugged than a $5 Bud box.
Why just not install the "F-bomb" into each operation system at the factory? Why spread them from airplanes? Nowadays almost each computer has got a mike and a camera.
And activate it only when necessary by a special encrypted signal from the central office. What could possibly go wrong?
As above, this idea was first put onto paper with the set of books How to Steal a continent and was called a creeper box.
I wanted to do the same with a rasperberrypi when they first come out, as it again is dirt cheap and has all the requirements (save a compatable wifi). It has no moving parts, draws a very small amount of power.
The only issue I'd have is could a battery package be made small enough to provide several weeks of uptime without making it huge ?
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