On the drive back to Belgium, Van De Moere and Maertens sized up their dilemma. Kids in Antwerp grow up inundated with news stories about shady shipping companies pushing narcotics through the port, and the friends now had little doubt that Adibelli and Okul were somehow involved in the drug trade. They’d already decided that going to the police wasn’t an option, they later explained, so they rationalized. Building pwnies isn’t itself a crime; anyone can buy a version on the Internet. As long as they were only supplying a device and not operating it for whatever scheme Adibelli and Okul had in mind, the pair concluded they wouldn’t be breaking the law.
The device they built looked like a European version of a power strip. Tucked inside a 15-by-5-inch casing was a tiny Linux computer running powerful hacking software called Metasploit. The pwnie sent out data via cellular networks, which meant they could be accessed from anywhere.
Read more at Bloomberg.
