Your Wi-Fi Can Be Hijacked From 8 Miles Away

Early on in the pandemic last, Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum elaborated on what he’s learned about NSA spying tactics and tools during a lecture at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg.  Although the reporting from Sarah Weber on this is nearly a year old, it is nevertheless important to share, as (for the first time) there is documentation of long-suspected spy capabilities that eventually could be used by other countries against U.S. citizens.

Appelbaum co-wrote a Der Spiegel report that sheds light on what spy agencies can access, including your iPhone, your newly purchased laptop computer, and most major security architecture.  But in his lecture, Appelbaum dropped this nugget: The NSA can tap into your wireless signal from up to eight miles away.

As proof, Appelbaum offered up a top secret NSA document detailing the capabilities of “Nightstand,” a wireless exploitation and injection tool that can — undetected — deliver spyware via your wireless card. The document (which was posted on a Wordpress blog called "Leaksource" and since disappeared from the internet along with the blog itself) was originally dated from 2008, so it’s possible the capabilities have been expanded since then.

Even creepier, Appelbaum said he’s talked to NSA sources who told him the devices have been used on drones, but he’s not yet come across documents to back that up.

“That’s a really interesting thing because it tells us that they understand that common wireless cards, probably running Microsoft Windows — which is an American company — that they know about vulnerabilities yet they keep them a secret to use them,” Appelbaum said. “This is part of a constant theme of sabotaging and undermining American companies and American ingenuity. As an American, though generally not a nationalist, I find this disgusting, especially as someone who writes free software and would like my tax dollars to be spent on improving these things.”

Though it seems Appelbaum’s chief complaint with NSA spying is that it’s tyrannical, he said the government’s interest in leaving security weaknesses open for exploit has “retarded the process by which we would secure the internet,” making systems and their users vulnerable to attack.