The intersection of animals and technology is about more than cat videos on YouTube and the Doge meme. This year’s Def Con hacking convention in Las Vegas showcased a pair of projects mixing pets with computer security.

War Kitteh and Denial of Service Dog were both the work of Gene Bransfield, from Tenacity Solutions, and involved attaching antennae and mini-computers to one friend’s cat and another’s dog.

For War Kitteh, Bransfield packed the kit onto the animal’s collar, including a Spark Core Wi-Fi development board running the Spark.io operating system, which gave the cat the connectivity it required. Its location was tracked using GPS technology, with data stored on an SD memory card.

What data? The point of the project was for War Kitteh to roam the streets, detecting Wi-Fi networks that were either unprotected, or using weak weak encryption algorithms like WEP.

On one wander, the cat picked up 23 unique Wi-Fi hotspots, four of which were completely open with no password required to log on, and another four using WEP rather than the more-secure WPA-2 standard.

Bransfield told the Guardian that the project was intended to spark awareness about why people should take more care securing their Wi-Fi networks, in the hope that involving cats in the debate will make less tech-savvy people pay attention.

“It’s been a failure of the industry and of Def Con-like hackers to appropriately communicate this stuff to people,” he said. “We need to do a better job of communicating this stuff… You don’t want to scare the shit out of them. You want to effectively communicate to them what the issues are.”



Denial of Service Dog. Photograph: Tom Brewster/The Guardian

Bransfield’s Denial of Service Dog project involved attaching a saddle-bag containing the WiFi Pineapple Mark V wireless network hacker tool and the TV-B-Gone kit to a dog, which was then walked around streets during World Cup matches earlier this summer.

Using a remote attached to the dog’s lead, Bransfield was able to scan TVs being used in bars along the route, and switch them off. For similarly educational purposes to War Kitteh? Well, no.

“There’s no socially redeeming thing about the dog... that was just trolling. I thought it would be funny so I did it,” said Bransfield, who said that people noticing the “Denial of Service Dog” wording on the bag simply assumed it was a police dog.

Bransfield said that he didn’t risk turning any TVs off while the USA were playing matches, but it’s safe to say he’ll tread carefully if he ever visits Buenos Aires. “If you turn an Argentina World Cup game off you are going to get in trouble...”

For his next trick, Bransfield is considering attaching hacker kit to flying things, although he warned that a carrier pigeon may not be able to carry the weight of this kind of technology. Drone-jamming war birds aren’t yet on the horizon, then. Literally.

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