As Maggie Jauregui was getting ready for a date last November, she was simultaneously blow drying her hair and chatting with her boyfriend over a walkie talkie—the sort of electronic gadget that the hacker couple enjoy messing around with. Suddenly, the hair dryer’s plug began to violently vibrate against the wall socket, then spark and release a curl of black smoke. “My jaw just dropped,” Jauregui says. “I had no idea what had just happened.”
That fried plug, she soon figured out, was the result of radio waves the walkie talkie had transmitted at just the right frequency to create an overload of current in a coil of wire inside a component of the hair dryer called a ground fault circuit interrupter, or GFCI. And in the months that followed, Jauregui experimented with that hair dryer mishap until she honed it into a reliable attack: At the DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas Saturday she plans to demonstrate on stage how a handheld directional radio antenna can be used to perform the same trick with the GFCIs integrated into household appliances like hair dryers and heaters or wall outlets, mischievously switching them off or making the plugs shake, spark and melt from as far as ten feet away.
Okay some of this sounds like a tall tale but I do know strong RF can trip a GFCI outlet, albeit more than a dinky walkie talkie would cause. Either way this is an interesting read and video. Now I have to get out my uv-5r and key up at full power and see what happens with our hair drier which is a similar looking model.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~