Oh noooes, DRONES!!!!! Yes they can spoof wifi. Duh.

NBC Chicago comes up with the Big News that you can stick a wifi router on a drone and have your drone pose as an "open" wifi point.

Drones are inexpensive, small and hard to detect when flying several hundred feet in the air. And security researchers warn the remote devices can also be outfitted to gather private information.

In a controlled environment, penetration tester Parker Schmitt and robot expert David Jordan attached a tiny computer to a drone to show how the device could be used for nefarious purposes. While in the sky, the drone poses as an open Wi-Fi network and tricks other devices to connect to it. Once the connection is made, any information that passes through -- credit card information, home addresses, and telephone numbers -- can be obtained.

What they don't tell you is that this is -trivial- and the $5 chip which does it is the size of your baby fingernail.

This is a big one that is a wifi enabled micro-controller/embedded computer.

This is the WiFi part out of a pair of wifi headphones. Get it?

If you put one in a can and nailed it to a fence post it would do the same thing. Put one of those small solar panels on it, the ones the size of half a sheet of paper, give it a cell-phone battery, and you've got a permanent pirate wifi hotspot. Put a decent antenna on it and it can have a range of hundreds of feet.

The real danger is when these guys pose as cell-phone towers. They can do that too. Less trivial, a bit more power involved, but can still be mounted on a drone. Or a fence post, or in a street light, or you put it in a matchbox and throw dozens of them out the window of your car, one every half mile...etc.

This is more complicated and larger than a throw-away wifi pirate.

Notice that the largest part of the Twitter Fridge Magnet is the 9V battery? It could be a hell of a lot smaller. Those are Sparkfun Arduino boards made for hobby prototypes, not Secret Sam Spy Stuff.

This technology is getting ridiculously small and -cheap-, its going to be freakin' -everywhere- in the next five years.

Don't do your banking on your phone.

The Insufficiently Paranoid Phantom