when we heard the Canadian government was moving to B hacking tools like this
one we sprung into action buying as many of them as we could while we still
couldn't guys some of this stuff is flipping wild like this electromagnetic
fault injector which basically EMP bombs anything that you
pointed at how she doing oh whoopsy
Doodles but there was one device that stood out from the rest all the Jammers
sniffers looters and tutors that hack rf1 with the portter PAC H2 Mayhem
Edition now being a decade old radio transceiver you'd think it's got to be
pretty outdated by now but thanks to its robust developer ecosystem open- Source
design and ample tutorials for users of any level the hack rf1 has turned into a
virtually unmatched Wireless hacking Swiss army knife it's capable of
stealing a car breaking into a house stampeding cattle through the Vatican
and even creating a small pirate FM radio station that plays skibbidy toilet
on Loop but how exactly is this being
used by nefarious and law-abiding people alike should it be banned and what would
that even look like well we have some ideas just like we have some ideas on
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Go part of this device's superpower is its ability to read and transmit radio
signals and I already know what you're thinking so could my grandpa's TransAm
but Pea's whip was limited in both the frequencies that it could tune into and
in how it could use them not so for us
with the right setup we can detect and even glean useful information from radio
signals that you probably didn't even know existed like the ones coming from
this display cable it's stuck in grayscale but look at this you can
totally make out what this person is doing on their screen this style of
eavesdropping is called then e freaking and was first outlined in a 1985 paper
by its namesake whim van e of course that was 40 years ago surely Modern
Display protocols protect against this kind of snooping
right right well as long as you're
talking about DisplayPort VGA DVI and
yes even HDMI can all be monitored pun
intended with the hack RF provided that you are within range how far is that
range well for our relatively small
omnidirectional antenna we're looking at inches rather than meters but in his
original paper on the topic Vanek was able to spy on a CRT display several
hundred meters away using a directional FN antenna similar to the kind that was
found on home rooftops in the 20th century I mean sure that was an analog
signal coming from a type of display that oozed radiation but modern
techniques aren't that far off just a
few weeks ago researchers in Uruguay managed to train an AI to descramble
images at much greater ranges now the
quality of these images not to mention the model's likelihood to hallucinate
have yet to be seen let's not forget the Samsung pictures of the Moon debacle but
this still has major implications for people who are working with highly
sensitive information luckily most people aren't in possession of
information that's worth stealing at least not while it's this much effort to
do so but what most people do have is material things like this and this and
this and what's very little effort is using the hack rf1 to sneak past a
wireless security camera whether they're for Wi-Fi car
keys or cell phones Jammers all work roughly the same
way by sending out as much junk traffic
as possible at the same frequency to mask or disrupt legitimate traffic kind
of like shouting between two people trying to have a conversation and the
portter pack interface when it's updated with the jamming software plugin makes
makes jamming terrifyingly easy Once you know the channel a device is using which
you can often find with the hack rf1 all you need to do is Click transmit Jammer
select the channel from a list and hit go now obviously a GoPro would be a
pretty odd choice for a security camera but our point is that this kind of
technique is useful aha on pretty much any Wi-Fi camera and
unless it has local storage for backup
that's exactly what's going to happen you're going to get if anything little
bits and pieces of what's going on that's one of the main reasons that we
avoid wireless security cameras here at the office now this type of jamming is
illegal in most countries including Canada so you can safely assume that
everything you just saw was movie Magic and was shot in a Brazilian jail
Romanian one got to go
the question that must be in your mind now then is why don't they just ban
these things well as I mentioned before the Canadian government is certainly
trying but it's not really a simple task
for one thing like a hammer these devices have nefarious uses but they
also have many legitimate uses for example you can use the hack rf1 to
monitor for interference that might be affecting your Wi-Fi or your Bluetooth
devices you can get data on flights that are passing overhead you can listen to
FM radio and do so much more it's like a
full toolkit for learning about RF
another issue preventing a Crackdown on these is that not every type of jamming
requires easily detectable brute for spam a Wi-Fi deauthentication attack for
example finds the Mac Address of a Wi-Fi access point it copies it then
continuously sends deauthentication packets to every connected device
preventing them from staying connected the pagi or this deor watch are perfect
examples of devices that can perform these types of attacks literally from
your wrist and all they're doing is exploiting a perfectly legitimate
feature of the Wi-Fi protocol I mean you can Outlaw this behavior and they do but
how do you prove it didn't happen by accident how do you prove who did it the
last big obstacle to Banning these devices is that pretty much all of them
are based on cheap readily available single board Computers Plus parts that
can be easily found in a children's robotics Club I mean it's already
illegal in just about every country Canada included to be carrying around a
break-in instrument and the burden of proving you have a legitimate use for it
falls on the accused but even this relies on officers
to recognize that that video game or
Smartwatch looking thing is what it actually is so there's nothing we can do
to keep these tools out of the hands of Nells so what do we do now well we
contacted Great Scott gadgets creators of the hack rf1 to discuss this topic
and politely they told us to pound sand
fair enough I mean we did call their device aoral in our coverage of the
flipper zero but they also weren't alone
in denying our request for comment every hacking tool company that we contacted
from electronic cats to deike to our friends over at hack five where
completely unwilling to engage in conversation about the legality of their
products which makes a lot of sense I mean they build them for Security
Professionals but they're clearly being used by shadier folks with recent car
theft Trends grabbing a lot of headlines and putting them in an uncomfortable
position so I'm going to say what I believe they would say if they were
willing to say it the better solution is to beef up our security though this is
easier said than done in our flipper zero video we briefly explained how the
hack rf1 can be used to defeat rolling code security for a vehicle's keyless
entry system and if you're an avid Tik Tok user you're probably already
familiar with the Kia boys a trend where teenagers were stealing Kia and Hyundai
Vehicles made after 2012 by breaking open the steering column usually with a
screwdriver not purchased at LTD store.com and plugging a bog standard
USB cable into the ignition that doesn't even require a hack rf1 or anything
fancy so what's clear is that in the
interest of saving a buck modern devices can often take a painfully LAX approach
to Security even ones that cost tens of thousands of dollars like the Honda CRV
that vehicle holds the title of most stolen car in Canada because while it
would normally take a fair bit of effort to defeat rolling code not to mention
specialized equipment the rolling pone attack exploits a flaw that causes the
CRV to reset the code counter allowing previously used codes to both open and
start the vehicle and it took an embarrassing amount of time for Honda to
identify and address this issue so yeah
are these devices actually making it easier to steal cars and generally cause
trouble of course they are especially by making them so easily available to folks
who wouldn't have the wherewithal to build one themselves but the same could
be said for a hammer this could help you break into a car more easily are we
going to get rid of them so I think the focus should be on the big automakers
and how they manage to fail so so hard and on the organized crime networks that
are engaging in these practices at scale rather than on the makers of softwar
defined radio devices and the focus should be on our
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if you guys enjoyed this video and you want to know more on this subject check out our video on The Flipper zero
another Swiss army knife of Homebrew hacking