ESP8266 MCUs

With just two microcontrollers soldered together, you can inject keystrokes into a computer from a smartphone. After building and programming the device, you plug it into a desktop or laptop, access it over a smartphone, and inject keystrokes as you would with a USB Rubber Ducky.

The USB Rubber Ducky is a well-known hacking device in the cybersecurity industry, but it needs to be preprogrammed before it can be used. That means it's not easy to issue commands to a target computer since you can't interact with it from afar after plugging it in. And if you don't know what the target computer is, you might come up empty. That's where the WiFi Duck comes in handy.

Individually addressable LEDs, also commonly called "NeoPixels" after the popular Adafruit product, are a bright and colorful way to get started with basic Python programming. With an inexpensive ESP8266 or ESP32 microcontroller, it's easy to get started programming your own holiday lighting animations on a string of NeoPixels with beginner-friendly MicroPython!

The only thing better than programming MicroPython is programming MicroPython over Wi-Fi. So once you set up MicroPython on a microcontroller and have it on its own power source, you won't need to use a data cable to connect to it whenever you need to interact with it, program it, upload files, or grab data.

For anyone interested in using cheap, Wi-Fi-connected microcontrollers like the ESP8266, the Arduino programming language can be a barrier to entry. Based on C++, Arduino requires knowledge of more computer science than languages like Python. Fortunately for beginners, setting up MicroPython on an ESP8266 allows anyone to write Python on affordable microcontrollers in a matter of minutes.

In many urban areas, GPS doesn't work well. Buildings reflect GPS signals on themselves to create a confusing mess for phones to sort out. As a result, most modern devices determine their location using a blend of techniques, including nearby Wi-Fi networks. By using SkyLift to create fake networks known to be in other areas, we can manipulate where a device thinks it is with an ESP8266 microcontroller.

The price of hacking Wi-Fi has fallen dramatically, and low-cost microcontrollers are increasingly being turned into cheap yet powerful hacking tools. One of the most popular is the ESP8266, an Arduino-programmable chip on which the Wi-Fi Deauther project is based. On this inexpensive board, a hacker can create fake networks, clone real ones, or disable all Wi-Fi in an area from a slick web interface.

Arduino is a language that's easy to learn and supported on many incredibly low-cost devices, two of which are the $2 Digispark and a $3 ESP8266-based board. We can program these devices in Arduino to hijack the Wi-Fi data connection of any unlocked macOS computer in seconds, and we can even have it send data from the target device to our low-cost evil access point.

While hackers know and love the Raspberry Pi, many don't know of its cheaper cousin, the microcontroller. Unlike a Pi, which can be used more or less like a regular computer, microcontrollers like the Wi-Fi connected ESP8266 require some necessary programming skill to master. In this guide, we'll build an Arduino program from scratch and explain the code structure in a way anyone can understand.

Fireworks are the best part about the Fourth of July and other celebrations, but they can easily cause accidental injuries. It's both safer and more fun to set them off remotely, so we'll hack some standard fireworks with nichrome wire, a relay, and an Arduino to ignite remotely over Wi-Fi using any smartphone or computer.

Smartphones and other Wi-Fi enabled devices send radio signals called probe frames to locate nearby wireless networks, which makes them easy to track by listening for their unique MAC address. To show how this kind of tracking works, we can program a NodeMCU in Arduino to sniff the air for packets from any device we want to track, turning on an LED when it's detected nearby.

The most common Wi-Fi jamming attacks leverage deauthentication and disassociation packets to attack networks. This allows a low-cost ESP8266-based device programmed in Arduino to detect and classify Wi-Fi denial-of-service attacks by lighting a different color LED for each type of packet. The pattern of these colors can also allow us to fingerprint the tool being used to attack the network.