Brendan O'Conner of Malice Afterthought, a security consulting agency, is not helping bring back your sense of safety. A self-described and unabashed hacker who has worked for DARPA, O'Conner has also taught at the US military's cybersecurity school. His new project, CreepyDOL (or Creepy Distributed Object Locater), is raising eyebrows.Essentially, CreepyDOL allows a user to track, locate and then break into some unsuspecting victim's smartphone.
"For a few hundred dollars," he says, "I can track your every movement, activity and interaction, until I find whatever it takes to blackmail you."
O'Conner, 27, wanted to see if a private citizen could do pretty much the same thing the NSA is doing but on a budget. He created boxes, costing a mere $57, that intercepted and transmitted data carried by nearby Wi-Fi networks.
"Actually it's not hard," O'Conner told The New York Times. "It's terrifyingly easy...It could be used for anything depending on how creepy you want to be."
"It eliminates the idea of 'blending into a crowd,'" he claims. "If you have a wireless device (phone, iPad, etc.), even if you're not connected to a network, CreepyDOL will see you, track your movements and report home."
O'Conner contends that he didn't spy on anyone, instead testing the equipment only on himself. In fact, he says that use of the device on someone is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning was convicted of last week.
"I haven't done a full deployment of this because the United States government has made a practice of prosecuting security researchers," O'Conner says. "Everyone is terrified."