QuoVadis Posted December 4, 2015 Report Posted December 4, 2015 A hacker has launched an assault on hipsters. Steve Lord, a security researcher, convention founder and pen tester at Mandalorian Security Services has built the ‘hipster slayer'.The slayer essentially works by denying people access to Instagram (and other social media sites), and in turn denying them the ability to post their selfies. Powered by Raspberry Pi Zero, a computer built to be low cost (less than a fiver), the slayer finds DNS lookups on public WIFI networks. When it sees someone using that network to post to a site like Instagram, the Slayer sends special networks frames, denying them access to social media. Lord will be showcasing his product later this month in New Zealand at Kiwicon, as part of a line of gadgets he calls The Internet of Wrongs whichwill “change the way you antagonise people, forever”. Lord will show, among other things, ways to “passively aggressively disrupt Mac-loving douchebags who harp on about the amazing battery life of aforementioned Mac owning douchebags” and “siphon off delicious sweet cyber data via dedicated MITM devices in a mostly difficult to detect manner.” The Internet of Wrongs devices have been described eloquently by Lord as one of the “pettiest, shittiest cyber weapons imaginable.” The final device which he may or may not show at his upcoming talk is the ‘Schwiftifier', named after a song in the cult cartoon, Rick and Morty. The Schwiftifier plugs into a USB, hijacks the ethernet cable and creates an iframe which plays the Daft Punk remix of Get Schwifty'. Lord spoke to SCMagazineUK.com on his line of annoying gadgets. These devices “are there to kind of antagonise people. They have no actual purpose.” Lord has spent a lot of time over the last couple of years playing with IoT devices and “the more I started tinkering with the frameworks the more I realised you could start doing interesting things with them”. That said, the line of devices has a larger point to it. New Zealand, where he will be speaking, is seriously considering putting in a metadata retention programme, similar to what Edward Snowden disclosed about the NSA and GCHQ. That said, the last terrorist attack on New Zealand soil happened thirty years ago and was carried out by the French government, so why now and what use could it be to a country who hasn't dealt with terrorism of any kind in recent memory? The arguments we hear about metadata and encryption are non-sequiturs, says Lord: “We've seen all these conversations about how do we restrict exploit code and you sit there and you think the most powerful weapon that people will have is a web browser and you end up with this debate on encryption that really shouldn't be a problem.” What Lord has created tries to “get people to start thinking that hardware is not this magical world” but that “you can create tiny little devices that can create chaos”.SURSA Quote
