Think that putting a password on your WiFi network will keep away pesky leechers and hackers? Think again. Speaking at the Chaos Communications Congress, security researcher Jacob Appelbaum revealed that the NSA had a device that is able to hack your WiFi from as far as 8 miles away! In fact Appelbaum speculates that the exploits used to hack your WiFi could even be delivered by drone, but concluded that it would be simpler and possibly more discreet to use an unmarked van parked at the side of the road.
For those unfamiliar, Appelbaum is the author of the Der Spiegel article that first revealed the NSA’s catalog. While the catalog in question dates back to 2007, Appelbaum believes that these tactics are still being employed by the NSA, if they haven’t been improved upon and advanced over the years already. One of the examples that he gave was how Julian Assange’s home at the Ecuadorian Embassy received welcome messages from a Ugandan telephone company, where the messages were later found to have originated from a foreign base station device installed on the roof, and that whoever owned it had forgotten to format the device which might have been used during an operation in Uganda.
If you’d like to learn more about the hack and some of the NSA’s catalog in general, you can check out the video above in which Appelbaum delivers his findings. It’s pretty long at over an hour but definitely worth taking a look at.