You Can Build a Flying Spybot for Less Than $50

As the U.S. government spends billions and billions outfitting the military with sophisticated spy drones, one hacker's taken things into his own hands and built a very cheap but very functional drone-ready surveillance device. "Built from just the hardware in a commercially-available PogoPlug mini-computer, a few tiny antennae, eight gigabytes of flash memory and some 3D-printed plastic casing, the F-BOMB serves as 3.5 by 4 by 1 inch spy computer," Forbes Andy Greenberg explains in a detailed new report on the F-BOMB, which is short for Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors. "And O’Connor has designed the cheap gadgets to dropped from a drone, plugged inconspicuously into a wall socket, thrown over a barrier, or otherwise put into irretrievable positions to quietly collect data and send it back to the owner over any available wi-fi network. With PogoPlugs currently on sale at Amazon for $25, O’Connor built his prototypes with gear that added up to just $46 each." All you have to do to drone-ify the thing is attach it to one of these fairly affordable remote-controlled helicopters, and you're ready to start spying! Did we mention that O'Connor's project is funded by DARPA? Typical.