Spy Gear

If, during your next hotel stay, you're met with a lock on your door like that pictured above, it's time for a conversation with management. This is an Onity HT series lock. Cody Brocious claims that the company has sold 10 million of its various locks to hoteliers, accounting for half of all locks worldwide, and appearing in one in three hotels. Described by Onity as its "flagship product," the HT series lock is its big seller: Brocious reckons there are 4 million HT series locks out there. Why does this matter? It matters because on July 24, Brocious took to the stage at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas to demonstrate how to unlock one in a matter of milliseconds using gear you and I can buy off the shelf from Radioshack for under 50 bucks.  Read More

Here's one for gun collectors with an eye for detail. The SwissMiniGun C1ST is a double-action .09 caliber six-shooter that's just over two inches (5.5 cm) long weighing 0.7 oz (19.8 g). The level of detail is amazing – the Swiss gunsmiths behind the MiniGun are experienced in jewelry and watchmaking crafts, and have orders to produce works of art that happen to be fully functioning guns. And the price? We think you ought to sit down first ...  Read More

The Power Pwn is a fully-integrated, enterprise-class penetration testing platform. A successor to the popular Pwn Plug, the device features a highly-integrated modular hardware design. Backed and funded by the Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA), it aims to provide corporations and security-conscious individuals with a cheaper and easier means to defend themselves against hackers, by providing them with the same set of tools as their digital assailants.  Read More

If you’ve ever found yourself bemoaning the relative dearth of viable personal UAV (or "drone") options but still find the idea of an eye in the sky alluring, then you may well be in luck, because UK-based gadget purveyor RED5 has unveiled the Spy Hawk: a remote-controlled plane which runs from a rechargeable battery and features a video camera to facilitate easy snooping from up above.  Read More

Looking for something to jot down a few lines of poetry as you sip camomile tea from your Battle Mug? While a Bic might do the trick, it would perhaps be more appropriate to use the UZI Tactical Defender Pen.  Read More

Imagine if you could turn your iPhone into an advanced night vision recording device, tuned to your every espionage whim. No, there's not an app for that ... but there is the USNV Night Vision iPhone Adapter. Before you get too excited about it, you should note that it doesn't directly turn an iPhone into a night vision scope – you'll still need an actual separate scope. What the NViA does is bridge the iPhone with the night vision scope to leverage iPhone features like video recording, geo-tagging and messaging ... because when you're in the middle of a midnight tail, sometimes you want to go back and scour the footage for more clues – or I assume that you might want to do that, if you were some type of vigilante running around the city with a pair of infrared goggles.  Read More

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory wants to find a better way for airmen to scale tall structures or rock faces, so it did what just about anyone seeking new ideas does these days – it held a contest. Its 2012 Service Academy and University Engineering Challenge saw teams from 17 universities and three service academies showing off their wall-scaling systems, earlier this month at Wright State University’s Calamityville tactical laboratory in Fairborn, Ohio. One of the teams, from Utah’s Brigham Young University, devised an impressive system that was inspired directly by Batman’s grappling hook-shooting, power winch-equipped gun.  Read More

German cyberpunk weapons-maker Patrick Priebe has created another dangerous toy, and this one's a doozy. Previously, he’s built things such as a laser-sighted wrist-mounted crossbow, and a hand-mounted flamethrower. His latest creation, the Blade Driver, is a full-size laser-sighted crossbow ... oh yeah, and instead of shooting arrows, it shoots spinning rotary saw blades.  Read More

Japan’s Hitachi Kokusai Electric has developed a surveillance system that can automatically detect a face in either a provided photo or video footage, then search for that same face in other video provided by networked cameras. While such facial recognition systems have been seen before, this one is able to compare the target face against others at an astounding rate of 36 million faces per second.  Read More