Snoopy drone tricks smartphones into spilling your secrets

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Mobile By Lee Mathews Mar. 21, 2014 11:35 am
There’s a new Snoopy in the sky, and this one isn’t flying a doghouse and dueling with the Red Baron. This Snoopy is a drone, and it’s out to steal private data from unwary smartphone, tablet, and laptop users.
Snoopy is the creation of white hat hacker Glenn Wilkinson, who works for SensePost Information Security. The drone is basically a flying honeypot, waiting for unsuspecting smartphones to try to connect to known SSIDs. Once they’ve established a connection, Snoopy starts sucking up all the information that your device sends over the Internet.
The average user isn’t going to suspect that anything strange is going on. To most, it would appear as though their device has simply made a connection to a Starbucks or McDonald’s Wi-Fi network and is happily surfing the web. Meanwhile, Snoopy is sifting out tasty morsels like Paypal credentials and credit card numbers.
And since Snoopy is self-powered and extremely mobile, whoever’s controlling it can zip around wide open spaces like parks and steal data from numerous users with minimal fuss. It’s no secret that intercepting data from Wi-Fi users in public spaces isn’t all that hard — we’ve seen plenty of proof of that in the past. Firesheep, for example, made sniffing user data as easy as installing a Firefox add-on.
On a positive note, Snoopy isn’t quite as evil as CNN makes it out to be. Though their post title and video claim it’s capable of hacking your phone or stealing the data stored on it, that’s not the case. Snoopy steals information your devices send to it, plain and simple.
Fortunately for us, the FAA vans are mobilizing early and often these days and there are few things they enjoy more than grounding anything that can be referred to as a drone. Maybe there’s a silver lining to their overzealousness after all!



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