GPS Spoofing in Practice: How to Catch All Pokemon Without Leaving Home

Pokémon Go has become a big hit - it brings in $ 10 million per day , it has been installed more than 100 million times . Such popularity attracted hacking fans too - it turned out that it was possible to trick the game and catch Pokemon, without leaving home, using the GPS Spoofing technique.

How it works

The essence of the game is that a person moves around the city and is looking for fabulous creatures - Pokemon. Players can challenge Pokemon to fights and catch if they win. In addition, Pokemon can be grown from eggs, which will not have to catch them, and walk around the city for a certain distance (from two to ten kilometers). Capturing and growing pokemon allows players to increase their level - this opens up the possibility of catching more powerful monsters and getting even bigger rewards.
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Accordingly, the use of GPS is critical for this game. The application must understand where the player is located in order to display information about Pokemon available to catch.



Using GPS Spoofing allows you to fool the gaming application - the program needs to be convinced that a person moves around the city while he really does not move. The network has already published videos that tell how you can trick the Pokémon Go application for iPhone. The only disadvantage is that anyone who wants to cheat in the game will have to perform a jailbreak procedure for their smartphone.



In addition, there are guides on how to trick the application for Android. The essence of the fraud does not change - with the help of a special tool for forging GPS coordinates, the player can “move” around the map, setting new coordinates. In this case, in fact, you can not even get up from the couch.

How to avoid a ban

Game developers are actively blocking users who violate the rules of using the service and cheat the application. Although it is still not known exactly how the system tracks the use of GPS spoofing. However, the community of players has already developed some recommendations that reduce the likelihood of a ban.

In particular, when using the equipment, it is recommended not to use it too explicitly - not to change the coordinates very often and at a considerable distance from the user's past point or home region (traveling from Australia to Japan for an hour will definitely lead to blocking).

In addition, even when moving within the same city, users are cautious - for example, after changing coordinates to a far region, the player can turn off the application and run it in an hour. In this case, it will be very likely that the person just drove to the right place in the transport.

Not only pokemon

To deceive Pokémon Go, they use not only “bogus” programs, but also real GPS spoofing at the radio broadcast level. True, you need a special device to suppress the present GPS signal and replace it with a “fake satellite”:



GPS can be tricked and easier than in this video - using a common SDR called HackRF . However, the authors of the method honestly warn that in many countries transmission on the frequencies used by the HackRF “jammer” is prohibited.

It’s time to remember that global positioning systems are used not only for games. Now there is a GPS or GLONASS receiver in almost every smartphone, they are actively used in navigators and transport systems. In addition, such equipment is installed on many devices that do not move anywhere (for example, on ATMs). At the same time, the level of confidence in satellite signals tends to 100%. This means that hacking GPS opens up large-scale opportunities for conducting a variety of attacks.

You can listen to what global GPS and GLONASS global positioning systems exploit can be heard on September 8 at 14:00 at the free webinar of Pavel Novikov, an expert on telecommunications security company Positive Technologies.

You can register for the webinar here: www.ptsecurity.ru/research/webinar/96979/