If you had only heard about Flipper Zero through TikTok, where the tool has gone viral, you might think that it was a toy that could make ATMs spit out money, cars unlock themselves, and gas spill out of pumps for free.I spent the last week testing one to determine whether the world was as vulnerable to Flipper Zero as social media made it out to be.What I found was mixed: Many of the most dramatic videos posted to TikTok are likely staged—most modern wireless devices are not susceptible to simple replay attacks—but the Flipper Zero is still undeniably powerful, giving aspiring hackers and seasoned pen-testers a convenient new tool to probe the security of the world’s most ubiquitous wireless devices.But in my week testing Flipper Zero, it felt more like a blacklight—something I could literally hold up to a device that would reveal information, invisible to the human eye, about how it worked, what data it was emitting, and how often it was doing so.When I told Alex Kulagin, one of Flipper Zero’s co-creators, about my experiences using his tool to make these kinds of mundane observations, he explained that this is exactly what the device is meant for."