Hackers' Flying Drone Now Eavesdrops On GSM Phones

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas next week, Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins plan to show the crowd of hackers a year's worth of progress on their Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform, or WASP, the second year Tassey and Perkins have displayed the 14-pound, six-foot-long, six-foot wingspan unmanned aerial vehicle. The WASP, built from a retired Army target drone converted from a gasoline engine to electric batteries, is equipped with an HD camera, a cigarette-pack-sized on-board Linux computer packed with network-hacking tools, including the BackTrack testing toolset and a custom-built 340 million word dictionary for brute-force guessing of passwords, and eleven antennae. On top of cracking Wi-Fi networks, the upgraded WASP now also performs a new trick: impersonating the GSM cell phone towers used by AT&T and T-Mobile to trick phones into connecting to the plane's antenna rather than their carrier, allowing the drone to record conversations and text messages on 32 gigs of storage."

Re:If government was doing this

[element-o.p.]

I don't like these guys any more than I like the government and don't trust them any further than I could throw them.

Tassey and Perkins will demonstrate the WASP’s high-flying exploits at next week’s Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas...Tassey, a security consultant to Wall Street and the U.S. intelligence community and Perkins, a senior security engineer supporting the U.S. government [emphasis mine]... [suasnews.com]

In this case, the difference between "hackers" and "the government" appears to be negligible, at best.

Re:Emergency cell tower

[Thail]

After Hurricane Katrina, T-Mobile did something very similar. The mounted what is commonly referred to as a COW (Cell on Wheels) onto a helicopter, then flew over the flooded areas. If a cell phone attempted to connect to the tower (Any GSM handset, didn't have to be t-mobile) they were then able to fly around and triangulate the position and find survivors.