Gadgets series on The Verge

I stumbled across the Hacking gadgets series on The Verge.

• The HakCat WiFi Nugget is a beginner’s guide to wireless mischief

  It’s really just a tool for learning how to spoof Wi-Fi access points, learn about deauth attacks, and explore the possibilities of what simple microcontrollers can do. And it looks cute, to boot.

• The Flipper Zero is a Swiss Army knife of antennas

  few devices have captured the imagination of your friend who works in IT quite like the Flipper Zero: a hacking multi-tool shaped like a playful child’s toy and adorned with a friendly dolphin. Packed with a range of sensors, chips, and antennas, the Flipper lets you make playful mischief with all sorts of devices, from security gates to card readers.

• The new USB Rubber Ducky is more dangerous than ever

  To the human eye, the USB Rubber Ducky looks like an unremarkable USB flash drive. Plug it into a computer, though, and the machine sees it as a USB keyboard — which means it accepts keystroke commands from the device just as if a person was typing them in.
  
  “Everything it types is trusted to the same degree as the user is trusted,” Kitchen told me, “so it takes advantage of the trust model built in, where computers have been taught to trust a human. And a computer knows that a human typically communicates with it through clicking and typing.”

• The WiFi Coconut is a router’s evil twin

  Where most routers make do with two to six antennas, the Coconut has 14, one for each channel in the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi spectrum. That lets the coconut listen and log every channel simultaneously, creating a scannable record of everything that happened on the Wi-Fi spectrum within listening range. One of the Coconut’s most basic functions is creating these recordings along with some basic packet analysis — the Wi-Fi equivalent of recording every station on the radio at once.

• The O․MG Elite cable is a scarily stealthy hacker tool

  “It’s a cable that looks identical to the other cables you already have,” explains MG, the cable’s creator. “But inside each cable, I put an implant that’s got a web server, USB communications, and Wi-Fi access. So it plugs in, powers up, and you can connect to it.”

• The ChameleonMini is a skeleton key for RFID

  The ChameleonMini is a tool that allows you to emulate and clone high-frequency contactless cards and read RFID tags. It functions as an NFC emulator and RFID reader and can sniff and log radio frequency (RF) data. From a distance, it looks vaguely like a credit card, although there are multiple form factors. You can use it standalone or connect the device to your phone over Bluetooth and use one of the many chameleon apps to conduct penetration tests on your own systems.

• The Deauther Watch is the world’s most annoying wearable

  The Dstike Deauther watch can knock a device off of its Wi-Fi network, which is very annoying. You can also do a beacon attack, which lets you create a fake access point with names of your choice, or a probe attack, which can be used to confuse Wi-Fi trackers. It lets you monitor Wi-Fi traffic and, of course, also has a clock (with NTP time server synchronization) and a powerful laser pointer because if you are already wearing something that looks like that, you may as well take it to its logical conclusion.

• The Hunter Cat is a bodyguard for your credit card

  The Hunter Cat is a small device powered by a coin battery and roughly the size and dimensions of (you guessed it) a credit card. It’s pretty simple! You swipe it into the vape shop or gas station ATM in question, check for one of three lights, and if you get a “warning” or “dangerous” light, then consider another location. When you want to try again, just click the reset button. The card even has a sleep function that shuts the device off after 15 seconds to save on battery life.
  
  The Hunter Cat is produced by Electronic Cats and Salvador Mendoza and powered by a tiny ATMEL SAMD11 Arm Microcontroller. It works by detecting the number of magnetic heads in a given card reader. If everything’s kosher, you’ll only see one magnetic head – the head the ATM uses to read your card. If the Hunter Cat sees multiple devices, it will give you a warning light to let you know something’s off. Most likely, someone has added a second card reader on top of the ATM to steal your credit card information.

• The Ubertooth One lets you take a bite out of Bluetooth

  The Ubertooth One is a small, open-source USB device with an antenna powered by an ARM Cortex-M3 chip and a CC2400 wireless transceiver. Plug it into your computer’s USB port, and you can sniff and monitor Bluetooth signals from nearby devices.

This is fascinating stuff, simultaneously both compelling and terrifying. It feels like science fiction, but is real.