Late last month, a Siamese cat named Coco was roaming her suburban Washington, D.C., neighborhood. She spent three hours exploring nearby yards. And while she was out, Coco mapped dozens Wi-Fi , identifying four routers that used an old, easily cracked form of encryption and four others that were completely “unprotected.”
Unbeknownst to her, Coco was wearing a collar created by the cat owner's granddaughter's husband, security researcher Gene Bransfield. And Bransfield had embedded a Spark Core chip loaded with specific firmware code, a Wi-Fi, a tiny GPS unit, and a battery in the collar—everything necessary to map out all the networks in the neighborhood that would be vulnerable to any intruder or a few simple Wi-Fi hacking tools.
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