22 Facts About Samy Kamkar

Samy Kamkar was born on December 10,1985 and is an American privacy and security researcher, computer hacker and entrepreneur.

Samy Kamkar created SkyJack, a custom drone which hacks into any nearby Parrot drones allowing them to be controlled by its operator and created the Evercookie, which appeared in a top-secret NSA document revealed by Edward Snowden and on the front page of The New York Times.

Samy Kamkar has worked with The Wall Street Journal, and discovered the illicit mobile phone tracking where the Apple iPhone, Google Android and Microsoft Windows Phone mobile devices transmit GPS and Wi-Fi information to their parent companies.

Samy Kamkar has a chapter giving advice in Tim Ferriss' book Tools of Titans.

The worm carried a payload that would display the string "but most of all, Samy is my hero" on a victim's profile and cause the victim to unknowingly send a friend request to Kamkar.

In 2006, Samy Kamkar was raided by the United States Secret Service and Electronic Crimes Task Force, expanded from the Patriot Act, for releasing the worm.

Also per the aforementioned agreement, Samy Kamkar was allowed to keep a single computer that was not connected to a network, but explicitly prohibited from any internet access during his sentence.

Since 2008, Samy Kamkar has been doing independent computer security and privacy research and consulting.

Samy Kamkar released code demonstrating wireless identity theft of physical access control cards, including that of HID Global cards, using RFID with the use of only a credit card sized device, removing the need for any computer to be connected.

In 2010, Samy Kamkar traveled to more than a dozen countries speaking about his mobile security research and weaknesses he discovered from his cryptanalysis of the PHP programming language, including speaking at some of the largest annual hacker conventions in the world such as DEF CON, Black Hat Briefings and ToorCon.

In late 2010, Samy Kamkar traveled to Bratislava to attend Faraday Hack Day to help expose political and corporate corruption within Slovakia's government.

In early 2011, Samy Kamkar joined the Board of Directors of Brave New Software, a non-profit organization originally funded by a multimillion-dollar US State Department grant.

In early 2010, Samy Kamkar discovered a major flaw in all versions of the PHP programming language, specifically in the pseudorandom number generator, which allowed an attacker to hijack the session ID of a user and take over their session.

Samy Kamkar released a patch and once fixed, released exploit code demonstrating the attack which was possible on major banks, social networks, and forums.

In 2010, Samy Kamkar released Evercookie, a cookie that "apparently cannot be deleted", which subsequently was documented on the front page of The New York Times.

In 2011, Samy Kamkar discovered the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone mobile devices were continuously sending GPS coordinates, correlated to Wi-Fi MAC addresses, back to Apple, Google and Microsoft respectively, and released his research through several front page The Wall Street Journal articles.

Samy Kamkar discovered that some of this data was exposed by Google and he released Androidmap, a tool exposing Google's database of Wi-Fi MAC addresses correlated to the physical coordinates populated by Android phones.

In 2013, Samy Kamkar created SkyJack, a combination of open source software and hardware to run on an unmanned aerial vehicle which was "engineered to autonomously seek out, hack, and wirelessly take over other Parrot drones within wifi distance, creating an army of zombie drones".

On July 30,2015, Samy Kamkar introduced OwnStar - a small electronic device that could be concealed on or near a General Motors vehicle to interpose itself between the vehicle's OnStar link and the driver's OnStar RemoteLink app.

In 2015, it was reported that Samy Kamkar had built an inexpensive electronic device about the size of a wallet that could be concealed on or near a locked vehicle to capture a single keyless entry code to be used at a later time to unlock the vehicle.

Samy Kamkar stated that this vulnerability had been widely known for years to be present in many vehicle types, but was previously undemonstrated.

On November 16,2016, Samy Kamkar released PoisonTap; a USB Ethernet emulator that can be used to hijack all Internet traffic on a target machine, even if the computer was password protected and locked.