What do you do when the target you're spying on slips behind his home-security gates and beyond your reach?
Launch your personal, specially equipped WASP drone - short for Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform - to fly overhead and sniff his Wi-Fi network, intercept his cellphone calls, or launch denial-of-service attacks with jamming signals. These are just a few of the uses of the unmanned aerial vehicle that security researchers Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins demonstrated at the Black Hat security conference here Wednesday.

At a cost of about $6,000, the two converted a surplus FMQ-117B U.S. Army target drone into their personal remote-controlled spy plane, complete with Wi-Fi and hacking tools, such as an IMSI catcher and antenna to spoof a GSM cell tower and intercept calls. It also had a network-sniffing tool and a dictionary of 340 million words for brute-forcing network passwords.

The drone takes that concept and gives it flight. The plane weighs 14 pounds and is 6 feet long. Per FAA regulations, it can legally fly only under 400 feet and within line of sight. But the height is sufficient to quiet any noise the drone might produce, which the researchers said is minimal, and still allow the plane to circle overhead unobtrusively.

It can be programmed with GPS coordinates and Google maps to fly a predetermined course, but requires remote control help to take off and land.

The two security researchers created the spy plane as a proof of concept to show what criminals, terrorists and others might also soon be using for their nefarious activities. Tassey, a security consultant to Wall Street and the U.S. intelligence community, told the conference crowd that if the two of them could think up and build a personal spy drone, others were likely already thinking about it, too.

The spy drones have multiple uses, both good and bad. Hackers could use them to fly above corporations to steal intellectual property and other data from a network, as well as launch denial-of-service or man-in-the-middle attacks. They could also transmit a cellphone jamming signal to frustrate an enemy's communications.

A drone could also be used to single out a target, using the target's cellphone to identify him in a crowd, and then follow his movements. And it would be handy for drug smuggling, or for terrorists to trigger a dirty bomb.
 

Using publicly available data, it is now possible to identify strangers and gain their personal information - even their Social Security numbers - by using facial recognition software and social media profiles, according to a new study to be presented tomorrow at the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas.

Professor Alessandro Acquisti from Carnegie Mellon University and his research team studied the implications of the combining, or "mash-up," of three technologies: face recognition, cloud computing (an Internet technology) and social networks. The team studied the possibility of using publicly available Internet data and commercially available facial recognition software to reveal more information about a person than was intended.

Further, "Apple has acquired Polar Rose, and deployed face recognition into iPhoto. Facebook has licensed Face.com to enable automated tagging. So far, however, these end-user Web 2.0 applications are limited in scope: They are constrained by, and within, the boundaries of the service in which they are deployed. Our focus, however, was on examining whether the convergence of publicly available Web 2.0 data, cheap cloud computing, data mining, and off-the-shelf face recognition is bringing us closer to a world where anyone may run face recognition on anyone else, online and offline - and then infer additional, sensitive data about the target subject, starting merely from one anonymous piece of information about her: the face."

Now using a new commonly used Internet technology called "cloud computing," it is possible to easily run millions of facial comparisons in a matter of seconds.

Acquisti said the study "suggests that the identity of about one-third of subjects walking by the campus building may be inferred in a few seconds combining social-network data, cloud computing and an inexpensive webcam." He called it the "democratization of surveillance."
Then, using a technique he developed in a 2009 study and data gathered from the Facebook profiles of the subjects he identified, the research team could correctly predict the first five digits of the person's Social Security number 27 percent of the time after just four attempts.

Since these same tools are available to anyone, the results of the study may foreshadow a future in which there is no privacy. With the mass deployment of security cameras, smart phones and other data imaging devices, anyone could be identified almost anywhere. Not only could individuals be identified by friends and neighbors, but by government agencies as well. Anyone with a smartphone and Internet connection will be able to establish who someone is, where they live, how much they earn, a credit score and whether they've ever gotten a ticket. All that from a person's face.
 

U.S. spies are developing technology that would allow computers to pinpoint where in the world a picture was taken. The system would be used by the military to track down terrorists who are in hiding in remote regions, experts said.

Pictures of the targets would be simply scanned into a computer that would within seconds return an exact match for the terrorist hideout. Troops would then be deployed to the area to capture the target. The futuristic technology could revolutionise the way that terrorists are targeted by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

It is now known exactly how the new technology is hoped to work. However, the computer may cross-reference clues in the picture with a vast database of images until a match is found.

A more advanced method would be to deduce the air pressure from the photograph and link it to a region with similar conditions at the time the photograph was taken. IARPA admitted that such advanced technology might not be available until 2016.

'The Finder Program aims to develop technology that, with the aid of an analyst, geolocates an outdoor image or video taken from anywhere on the land surface of the world, via the use of publicly available information,' IARPA said.

The agency said that the technology would have to be capable of pinpointing the location of pictures or videos within one minute, without the use of metadata or tags.

Google has recently introduced a 'reverse search' feature to its image facility which allows users to scour the web to similar pictures to one that they already have.

The next generation of military robots is set to be based on designs inspired by the insect world. The dragonfly drones and cyborg moths, with in-built micro-cameras, could revolutionise spying missions and rescue operations.

The advantage of using drones is that they can be used in emergency situations too dangerous for people and in secret military surveillance raids.

Zoologist Richard Bomphrey, of Oxford University, is leading a study to generate new insight into how insect wings have evolved. He said: 'Nature has solved the problem of how to design miniature flying machines. 'By learning those lessons, our findings will make it possible to aerodynamically engineer a new breed of surveillance vehicles that, because they are as small as insects and also fly like them, completely blend into their surroundings.'

The military would like to develop tiny robots that can fly inside caves and barricaded rooms to send back real-time intelligence about the people and weapons inside.

Currently, the smallest of state-of-the-art fixed-wing unmanned surveillance vehicles are around a foot wide. The incorporation of flapping wings is the secret to making the new designs so small.

The team's groundbreaking work has attracted the attention of NATO, the US Air Force and the European Office of Aerospace Research and Development.

The research is expected to produce findings that can be used by the defense industry within three to five years, leading to the development and widespread deployment of insect-sized flying machines in the next two decades.

Dr Bomphrey said: 'This is just one more example of how we can learn important lessons from nature. Tiny flying machines could provide the perfect way of exploring all kinds of dark, dangerous and dirty places.'