Build Your Own Scary Surveillance Jeep For Under $5000 With This Hacker's Guide

A Jeep becomes a spy mobile. You can build your own, with all the capabilities police and military enjoy, for little money and effort, says security consultant Drew Porter.

If you could turn your car into a surveillance vehicle capable of intercepting telephone calls, jamming communications and manipulating electronic systems run by critical infrastructure providers, would you do it? What if it cost less than $5000?

This is possible thanks to cheap kit and open source software, says security consultant and pro hacker from Coalfire, Drew Porter. He's kitted out his own 2008 Jeep Grand Cherokee Overland with nearly $5000 in radio, computing and power hardware so it can snoop on all kinds of information as he drives around. And Porter will teach others how to create their own covert spy car at the upcoming DerbyCon conference in Louisville, Kentucky later this month.

Porter has taken "war driving" - hacking on wheels - to the extreme to prove a point: as legal battles over NSA snooping and police use of phone-tracking Stingrays are waged, anyone can carry out similar surveillance with minimum effort and funding. "It started as a hidden project, mostly to hide it from my wife," Porter joked. "It worked really well for three months. So it’s definitely spot on with the covertness."

His own stealth mobile comes with two low-profile Ultra Wideband antennas collecting signals between the 700MHz-2700MHz bands of spectrum, and two more for capturing signals in the 125MHz-630MHz range. Along with the 7-inch HD monitor, a keyboard and mouse, they're the only things that make the Jeep look a little different.

Everything else is hidden. Under the boot (pictured below) are two power converters to keep the operation running, a mini computer (Porter changes between an AMD BRIX and an Intel NUC) to handle all the data constantly coming in through the antennas, two power amplifiers and two low noise amplifiers to pick up weaker signals. There's also the most expensive piece of kit, the USRP B210, a software-defined radio (SDR) that's responsible to tuning into the various signals in the surrounding area. SDRs are remarkably useful for hackers of all ilks, as they can be quickly tinkered with to pick up on signals from different frequencies, whilst feeding the data back to linked software. They can be incredibly cheap, as $120. The USRP B210 cost Porter $1100. In total, he spent $4419 of his own money.

A host of computing, software defined radio and battery power kit, hidden in the back of Drew Porter's stealth Jeep.

The Redz SIGINT software for on-the-move surveillance, or "war driving", will be released later this month.

All of that hardware is managed by Porter's bespoke software, dubbed Redz SIGINT (for signals intelligence). It allows him to view and interact with the surrounding spectrum at any time. It comes with various tools that form a veritable Swiss army knife for on-the-go hackers: a signals jammer to interrupt communications, analysis software for "unknown signals of interest" and a tool for replaying captured signals.

One of the "offensive" parts of Redz SIGINT is the IMSI capture tool. Such technology is built by a range of manufacturers, government contractor Harris Corp being the most famous, as it created the Stingray used by various police forces in the US. Stingrays essentially trick phones in a nearby area to connect to it. Combined with other software, they can be used to collect location data, phone information and the content of calls and texts. They've become a subject of controversy in recent years due to the FBI's deployment of them without a warrant. A US Department of Justice announcement this month affirmed that warrants had to be obtained before a Stingray was put to use.

A 2008 price list obtained by Public Intelligence indicated Harris' Stingray started at $75,000, though the additional software and antennas would have pushed the price up by tens of thousands of dollars. A Stingray 2 cost $148,000 on its own. But Porter was able to create a cheap and cheerful version of a Stingray by altering OpenBTS, an open source technology that is traditionally used to create cellular network access points.

"There was a whole bunch of news about Stingray. Everyone was like, it costs so many hundreds of thousands of dollars and ... it’s very noticeable. I was like, I have a similar system that doesn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that isn’t really noticeable," he told FORBES. "Obviously police have different capabilities and they have greater capabilities ... but this is generally what can be done with relatively cheap equipment."

Porter was keen to point out he only used his personal Stingray, jammers and other "active" intelligence gathering tools in controlled environments with willing participants; only passive surveillance of open information was harvested in public environments.

What use might the spy Jeep be to more malicious war drivers? Outside of straight-up spying on people's phones, they could look at disrupting critical infrastructure. Porter says he has regularly worked with companies managing America's power. In one case, he found a firm responsible for running a water power plant used one signal to open and close water gates. He collected this signal, analysed it and discovered he could simply replay it to activate the gates. "That’s one example of using a software-defined radio that could be quite devastating for a critical infrastructure environment," he added.

At DerbyCon, he will release the alpha version of Redz SIGINT and a PDF guide, "Build Your Own Covert SIGINT Vehicle". Porter hopes his stealth Jeep will prove just how cheap and easy it is for anyone to surveil. "The hardware is cheap enough, the equipment is good enough to do real signals intelligence which can be scary. I’m sure there are a lot of people who don’t want civilians to go signals intelligence, but it is a fact of our life, where everything in our life has to be connected now and really this Jeep takes advantage of that."

We could all be Big Brother if we wanted.
