When most people think about hackers and hacking, the image that comes to mind is that of a darkened basement with one or more computer geeks hunched over their monitors with a vast array of arcane technology all around them, plying their trade. It's a nice image, born more of Hollywood than reality. The truth is that hacking can be, and often is, done pretty much in plain sight.
What Does This Have To Do With A Cat?
Recently, mostly for fun, and in the true hacking spirit of seeing if it could be done, a hacker modified a cat collar so that it could scan and collect data on wireless networks as the cat walked around the neighborhood.
When the cat returned, the hacker took the collar off, removed the jump drive that was affixed to it, and scanned the data. While the cat was walking, he passed by numerous homes and businesses. If those homes and businesses had a wireless network, the name of the network and the level of its security was downloaded in real time onto the jump drive in the cat's collar. At the end of the discovery phase of the experiment, the hacker had a lovely spreadsheet detailing the names of all the networks in the area, with notes about which ones were totally unsecured.
From there, had he wished to, he could have systematically invaded each unprotected network and installed malware on the machines he found. These could have been anything from keystroke loggers to routines to swipe bank account and credit card information, to installing admin level controls that would essentially allow the hacker to enslave the devices and use them as part of a botnet.
At the root, hacking is about getting in without getting caught. One of the first things a hacker wants to do is misdirect the authorities, so if I was inclined to break into a bank's computer system and download account data, I obviously would not want to do that from my home computer. If I could find an unsecured home network, I wouldn't need to. I could simply log on to your computer, steal the data, copy it onto a drive I could access to get it off of your system, then let you take the fall for it.
The FBI would come to your house, not mine, and I could go on about my merry way, selling the data to the highest bidder, and spending my ill gotten gains while you tried desperately to convince the FBI that you had nothing to do with the heist. Good luck with that. The FBI doesn't play gently with hackers.
The cat collar could have been anything, of course. It could have been a dog collar, or sewn into the fabric of my jacket so that it was invisible. I could rig up a similar system and make it part of a baby's toy, so if I'm out pushing a stroller; who would expect someone pushing a baby carriage of hacking?- All the while I'm secretly gathering intelligence on unsecured networks.
This is an incredibly easy fix. There are free tools available, and built in tools on every wireless router sold, that can provide at least some basic level of security for your home or office network, but those tools are only good if you bother to use them. If you don't, you're simply asking for trouble. When you are hacked, and it's next to inevitable that you will be, you're going to have no end of trouble trying to convince the authorities that it wasn't you, and digging yourself out of the mess that you created for yourself.
