The NSA's elite hackers can hijack your Wi-Fi from eight miles away

Attendees at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this weekend got a surprising rundown of the NSA's surveillance capabilities, courtesy of security researcher Jacob Appelbaum. Appelbaum, who co-wrote the Der Spiegel article that first revealed the NSA catalog, went into further detail onstage, describing several individual devices in the catalog and their intended purposes.

Alongside pre-packaged exploits that allowed control over iOS devices and any phone communicating through GSM, Appelbaum detailed a device that targets computers through packet injection, seeding exploits from up to eight miles away. He even speculated the exploits could be delivered by drone, although he conceded that in most cases, an unmarked van would likely be more practical.

The brochure in question dates from 2007, suggesting capabilities may have advanced even further since then — but Appelbaum left little doubt that he believes these tactics are still in use, and offered several instances in which he's seen them in action. One case involved Julian Assange's current home at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where visitors were surprised to receive welcome messages from a Ugandan telephone company. It turned out the messages were coming from a foreign base station device installed on the roof, masquerading as a cell tower for surveillance purposes. Appelbaum suspects the GCHQ simply forgot to reformat the device from an earlier Ugandan operation.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/30/5...um-speech-30c3