Sinotrack and the NewGPS2012 platform didn’t respond to WIRED’s requests for comment, and the researchers say their hacking techniques against those systems still appear to work.
For more than a decade, cybersecurity experts and privacy advocates have warned that cheap, GPS-enabled children’s smartwatches and aftermarket vehicle accessories are riddled with security vulnerabilities that leave kids and drivers susceptible to hacking and tracking. But the sheer number of different brands and models of those devices has often made identifying the truly insecure gadgets feel nearly impossible for consumers.
More than any specific vulnerability, Solferini and Stykas say, they wanted to highlight that much of that daunting diversity among GPS devices—along with consumers’ sense of choice among them—is essentially an illusion.
“A parent in Sweden buying a ‘SafeKid’ watch and a parent in Spain buying a ‘SaveFamily’ watch are both sending their child’s location data to the same vulnerable myaqsh.com backend on Alibaba Cloud in mainland China, without knowing it,” they write in a whitepaper shared with WIRED ahead of their Black Hat presentation, referring to the online services of YiQingTeng. “The white-label model means a vulnerability in one backend affects dozens of consumer brands at the same time, and consumers have no way to tell which backend their product uses.”
Solferini and Stykas aren’t revealing the full details of the vulnerabilities they discovered in the three major platforms, in part because not all of them have been fixed despite sharing their findings with the companies for months. In the case of YiQingTeng, the manufacturer of the watch WIRED tested, however, they say an authentication security flaw would have allowed anyone to send commands to any SETracker-based device. That would let hackers exploit and take over devices at random or to target specific watches if they can determine an identifier for them, such as the parent’s email address the device is registered to. (To hack the smartwatch worn by a WIRED reporter, for instance, the reporter gave Stykas his email address but no other information about the device. Stykas says he could have easily targeted devices in other ways, such as hacking numerous watches and searching through them to find the nearest vulnerable devices or one associated with a target’s identifying information.)
In the case of SinoTrack, the researchers say they found that an account intended for demonstration purposes could be used to send commands to any of the platform’s millions of devices. They also found a SQL injection vulnerability—a flaw that essentially allows anyone to send commands disguised as data that are then executed by the SinoTrack server—that gave them access to tens of thousands of devices’ locations, passwords, and vehicle records.
Finally, for NewGPS2012 devices, the researchers say they found similar SQL injection vulnerabilities and were able to run their own code on the company’s servers. They also say they found evidence of a previous compromise of the company’s systems, suggesting other unauthorized users or hackers may have had access to it for an unknown period of time.
Dozens of Devices, Years of Warnings
Given the sheer number of different brands and resellers of those Shenzhen-manufactured gadgets, the researchers didn’t confirm the vulnerability of all of the individually branded devices they found to use YiQingTeng’s SETracker platform or the NewGPS2012 platform. WIRED couldn’t independently confirm each device’s vulnerability either. But the table below lists brands whose products were based at least in part on those platforms, as well as the company’s response when WIRED reached out for comment on the researchers’ findings.
Stykas and Solferini’s Black Hat talk is far from the first warning about the dangers of cheap GPS devices—even from these researchers themselves. Stykas and another researcher, Michael Gruhn, revealed a broad collection of vulnerabilities in GPS-enabled devices in 2018, which they called Trackmageddon. GPS-enabled automotive devices plugged into the OBDII port on cars’ dashboards have proven again and again to be vulnerable to hacking and tracking.
Children’s GPS-enabled watches have also been shown to be especially prone to critical privacy and security vulnerabilities: Pen Test Partners and the Norwegian government issued warnings about certain hackable children’s watches in 2017 and 2018, and another study by the Münster University of Applied Sciences in 2020 tested six children’s smartwatches and found serious vulnerabilities in five. “It was crazy,” Sebastian Schinzel, one of the Münster researchers, told WIRED at the time. “Everything was basically broken.”
