when we heard the Canadian government was moving to ban hacking tools like this one, we sprung into action, buying as many of them as we could while we still could.

And guys, some of this stuff is flipping wild, like this electromagnetic fault injector, which basically EMP bombs anything that you point it at. How's she doing? Oh, whoopsy doodles.

But there was one device that stood out from the rest of all the jammers, sniffers, looters, and tutors: the HackRF One with the Portapack 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Now, being a decade-old radio transceiver, you'd think it's got to be pretty outdated by now.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 HackRF One 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 "Skibidi 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 how to segue to our sponsor, Next To.

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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 Trans Am?

" But Pappy'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 van Eck phreaking and was first outlined in a 1985 paper by its namesake, Wim van Eck.

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 HackRF, 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, van Eck was able to spy on a CRT display several hundred meters away using a directional van Eck 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 HackRF One 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 PortaPack interface, when it's updated with the jamming software plugin, makes jamming terrifyingly easy.

Once you know the channel a device is using, which you can often find with the HackRF One, 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 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. Gotta 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 HackRF One 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 force 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 Flipper Zero or this Deauther 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 ne'er-do-wells.

So what do we do now? Well, we contacted Great Scott Gadgets, creators of the HackRF One, to discuss this topic, and politely, they told us to pound sand.

Fair enough, I mean, we did call their device abhorrent 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 Deauther to our friends over at HackRF, were 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 HackRF One can be used to defeat rolling code security for a vehicle's keyless entry system.

And if you're an avid TikTok 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 HackRF One 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 Pwn 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 software-defined radio devices.

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It’s TOO Easy to Accidentally Do Illegal Stuff with This

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


It’s TOO Easy to Accidentally Do Illegal Stuff with This

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