A new series looking at hardware built for hacking

Not all gadgets are meant to make life easier.

Some gadgets break things, exploiting cracks in our digital systems, prying them open, and crawling inside. Most often used by penetration testers — a kind of white-hat hacker hired to test a company’s security by breaking in themselves — these gadgets serve as a kind of road map to the most common vulnerabilities in our digital world.

For the most part, they’re commercialized versions of tech that already existed in a scrappier form, leaning on open-source software projects and decades of work developing attacks. But most importantly, they’re available, so if you decide you want to try out one of these attacks, the equipment is only a click away.

Please use them only for good.