It Looks Like a School Bathroom Smoke Detector. A Teen Hacker Showed It Could Be an Audio Bug

A couple Years ago, a curious 16 -year -old hacker named Reynaldo Vasquez -Garcia was on his laptop in his high school in the Portland region, seeing which computer systems could connect via Wi -Fi – “using the school network as a laboratory”, as he says – when he spotted a handful of mysterious devices with the “Ipvideo Corporation” laboratory.

After a more in -depth examination and some research on Google, Garcia understood that a company of this name was a subsidiary of Motorola, and the devices he had found in his school seemed to be something called the Halo 3C, a smoke detection gadget and “intelligent”. “They look like smoke detectors, but they have a lot of features like sensors and things,” said Garcia.

By reading in addition, it was intrigued to learn that the Halo 3C goes beyond the detection of smoke and vaping, including a distinct characteristic to discern vaping in particular. He also has a microphone to listen to “assault”, shots and keywords such as someone calling for help, a characteristic that in Vasquez-Garcia immediately raised more intrusive surveillance concerns.

Now, after months of reverse engineering and security tests, Vasquez-Garcia and a Hacker colleague with whom he has associated himself who goes through the pseudonym “Nyx”, has shown that it is possible to hack one of these Halo 3C gadgets- which they have taken care of by the nickname “Puck” and Snitch Puck “- and control it.

Reynaldo Vasquez-Garcia and Nyx in Las Vegas, NV on August 8, 2025.Photography: Ronda Churchill

During the Defcon Hacker conference today, they plan to show that by exploiting some relatively simple security vulnerabilities, any hacker on the same network could have diverted a halo 3C to transform it into an audio-listening listening bug in real time, deactivate its detection capacities, created with false alerts for vaping or parasites, or even play the sound or audio they have chosen vaping. Motorola said that he had since developed a firmware update to tackle security defects that will automatically switch to the cloud -connected devices by Friday.

Many pirate tips are exhibited in a video demo below, which the Vasquez-Garcia and the NYX made before their presentation: