Hacking gadgets: our favorite hardware to decrypt, bypass, and break things

Not all gadgets are meant to make life easier.

Some gadgets break things, exploiting cracks in our digital systems, prying them open, and crawling inside. Most often used by penetration testers — a kind of white-hat hacker hired to test a company’s security by breaking in themselves — these gadgets serve as a kind of road map to the most common vulnerabilities in our digital world.

For the most part, they’re commercialized versions of tech that already existed in a scrappier form, leaning on open-source software projects and decades of work developing attacks. But most importantly, they’re available, so if you decide you want to try out one of these attacks, the equipment is only a click away.

Please use them only for good.

Don’t let the pretty face fool you.

An all-purpose tool for making wireless mischief

The beloved hacker tool can now pwn you with its own programming language

It’s capable of monitoring 14 Wi-Fi channels at once, opening the door to all sorts of mischief

Is that phone charger doing more than you think it is?

Wireless card readers are everywhere — but they’re easy to spoof or otherwise attack if you have the right tools

A Wi-Fi-chipped watch with a single purpose: kicking people off their local networks with a deauthorization command

A single-purpose gadget to find out if a credit card reader is stealing your data

You never realize how many vulnerable BLE devices there are until you start sniffing.