Perhaps we should call cats by shouting "Here, Wiffi, Wiffi, Wiffi" instead of "Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty" from now on.

A cat collar that sniffs out Wi-Fi networks in a neighborhood has been developed by an Internet security expert and unveiled at the just concluded DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas.

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Gene Bransfield, principal security engineer at Tenacity Solutions, Inc., developed the Wi-Fi cat collar he named "War Kitteh" to uncover security failings in Wi-Fi systems.

The tech-packed collar carries a Spark Core board that maps wireless networks and their vulnerabilities wherever the cat wanders.

Bransfield said his experiment in creating a "pet-based network" was prompted by his realization that many of his neighbors were either using networks that had weak security or no security at all.

Bransfield said the concept of a Wi-Fi cat collar with special Wi-Fi capabilities came to him after he came across a special cat collar with a cellular component and a GPS device that tracked the cat's movements.

Bransfield then went to work developing War Kitteh.

"All you need now is a Wi-Fi sniffing device and you'd have a War Kitteh," he said.

He first used his War Kitteh on a Siamese cat named Coco. After three hours of wandering the neighborhood, Coco returned with information that revealed four Wi-Fi routers had no security encryption at all while another four were using an outdated security system, according to Tech Times.

Bransfield's collar used a battery, a GPS module, a Wi-Fi card and a Spark Core computer chip running on custom-coded firmware.

Bransfield made it clear that his intention in developing War Kitteh was not to use the cat as a weapon or a method of getting free Wi-Fi.

He said his experiment surprised him by revealing a number of routers that were still using the 10-year-old wired equivalent privacy encryption software that is easily hacked.

He hopes the Wi-Fi cat experiment will increase the public's awareness about Wi-Fi security and inform people they should secure their Internet networks.

"Cats are more interesting to people than information security," Bransfield said. "If people realize that a cat can pick up on their open Wi-Fi hotspot, maybe that's a good thing."

TagsWi-fi, public Wi-Fi, Cat, Internet scurity, Network security, hackers, DEF CON, Black hat, Black Hat security conference