“A Cyprus-based surveillance company claims to have built a car full of next-generation snooping kit that can infect Apple and Google phones from as far away as 500 metres,” Thomas Fox-Brewster reports for Forbes. “WiSpear, founded by one of Israel’s longtime surveillance market players Tal Dilian, is selling the car for between $3.5 million and $5 million and claims it has plenty of interest already.”
“The SpearHead 360 vehicle uses 24 antennas to reach out to target devices. Once a phone has been chosen, the WiSpear automobile has four different ways to force a phone to connect to its Wi-Fi-based interceptors from where it can start snooping on devices (using what are known as man-in-the-middle attacks),” Fox-Brewster reports. “Then there are four different kinds of malware for various operating systems, including Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android devices, according to Dilian.”
Fox-Brewster reports, “WiSpear showed off the van at the ISS World and Eurosatory conferences this month.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yeah, but what kind of gas mileage does it get?
Also, you don’t need a $5 million truck to infect Android. It’ll randomly infect itself for free!
Is this true? Can you really break into an iPhone via WiFi? I’m skeptical.
Yeah, and great value too… a $5 million car to break into a $500 phone… sounds like a winner, not.
I never use wifi on phone away from home. Its turned off when I venture out. Now if they can force my wifi to turn on that would be a problem and I doubt legal. Not that that matters anymore.
Yes, it does not matter, unfortunately. Now that the US gov. is perpetual war and the homeland is an official war zone, it can do anything it wants for, you know, national security. The courts play along with only a super, super rare victory for individual rights.
I do not see how these could be sold in the U.S. Only government surveillance agencies could bypass the legal issues, and even they would have a very hard time if the practice became publicly known.
I have confidence that Apple will continue to lock down the iPhone/iOS and make it increasingly difficult and expensive to break in. For this step, alone, I salute Apple and its core values!
“they would have a very hard time if the practice became publicly known”
Naaaaahhh! People’d still want the next Edward Snowden to be hung for treason.
Does it support CarPlay?
People that steal things couldn’t care less if it was legal. This is not surprising. It’s one more advance in the ever-morphing criminal mindset.
Huh? You think this of going to be bought by people normally defined as criminals? Nope. This is going to be bought be the criminals whose name badge says they work for law enforcement of some sort.
Like stated: talking about legality is a joke…no matter the deviant.
LOL, *chuckle* I nearly spit out my coffee!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker#Usage_by_law_enforcement
Talk of legality is a joke. This Stingray has been around for about 4 years now, and it is generally considered illegal, but many use it without anyone ever knowing, and some rulings have called it legal. The WiSpear just takes it a bit further, and all on the same shaky legal ground.
Apple should buy one of these cars (wouldn’t do much to dent their quarter of a trillion dollars in cash) and use it see if it works and if so, fix the iOS holes.