At this point of time, most of smartphones are loaded with an important function that requires WiFi service to be activated. Taking advantage of this, Hackers of London have created a drone that is proficient in taking data consists of locations and passwords directly from your smartphone.
The drone uses a codename “Snoopy” that targets busy city streets and specific phones switched on while using the WiFi settings and it is also an advantage for the drone that it uses the common smartphone features and thus, it continuously searches for the networks that are already approved and accessed by a user.
The developer of Snoopy, Glenn Wilkinson said in a report of CNN that whenever users will connect their smartphones to Snoopy, they will be shouting and noisily. There shouting would be like this, are you there Starbucks? Are you there McDonald’s?
Onboard software of snoopy then tries to be a part of the networks that are approved and connects to more than one secured devices at a time, acting as different networks. After connecting to the quadcopter, Snoopy seizes each transmission sent or received by a phone.
After stopping the individual media access control address of a phone, Snoopy is capable of seeing and recording data of sensitive nature such as location, username, passwords or even information about credit card that is more often accessed by accounts or websites.
“I can have a look at all of your traffic after your phone connects to me, “said by Wilkinson.” I’ve gone through the situation where somebody is searching for ‘Bank X’ cooperate Wi-Fi. In this way, we can be informed that that the concerned person is working at the bank.”
While giving an interview to CNN, Snoopy revealed multiple users of smartphones about how they were attacked by the drone, and within the space of an hour gathered the sensitive information and real time GPS location of about 150 smartphones. It also collected their Yahoo, Amazon and PayPal accounts created for testing purpose.
Daniel Cuthbert and Wilkinson, both belong to SensePost Information security a London based company developed Snoopy, have a plan of presenting their achievements at the cybersecurity conference named as Black Hat Asia which to be held in Singapore at 25th March.
Like lots of other companies of information security, SensePost completed a test to show the weak points of the technology that we use on daily basis. It is an important research that is being considered as very helpful in preventing the attack of drones permission for the side of the user before entering into a network. It is needed that this function must certainly be switched on after the research of SensePost.
