This is VERY comforting:
There are a lot of cool things you can do with $1,000, but scientists at an Austin, Texas college have come across one that is often overlooked: for less than a grand, how’d you like to hijack a US government drone?
A group of researchers led by Professor Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas at Austin Radionavigation Laboratory recently succeeded in raising the eyebrows of the US government. With just around $1,000 in parts, Humphreys’ team took control of an unmanned aerial vehicle operated by the US Department of Homeland Security.
After being challenged by his lab, the DHS dared Humphreys’ crew to hack into their drone and take command. Much to their chagrin, they did exactly that.
They did it, and they did it for cheap. While I see nothing wrong with petty hackers crashing the horrible domestic drones that are currently enacting Big Brother’s wishes in US Airspace, into large bodies of water, or landing them in private airfields where they can be scrapped for beer money, what do you think is stopping the people in central Asia that have payloads of hellfire missiles?
Yeah, that part really makes me feel warm and fuzzy.
Gee, what’s the Obama/Biden Hillary Military Strategy Team gonna do now? After all, there’s no need for a Big Military when one can just Bomb the Tangos from the air, right?
UAVs only work on medieval screwheads.
An opponent with any tech capability can jam or spoof them.
While I see nothing wrong with petty hackers crashing the horrible domestic drones that are currently enacting Big Brother’s wishes in US Airspace, into large bodies of water, or landing them in private airfields
Or crashing them into your car, your house, your job site……….
Or having them take surveillance photos of your house and send them to the F.B.I or D.E.A. as the location of a stash house?
….and let’s not even talk about how long it take for the ones in our skies are armed.
So long as it makes the .gov ground the UAVs and scrap them or sell them to the military.
These dangers are present NOW, I’m more worried about Daddy .Gov than I am about hackers. Maybe I’m naive, but at least the hackers will have legal recourse for their negligent actions. The .gov? Well just look at the TSA!
The problem with the hacking is you have to know its up there in the first place.
I want to see dogfights between the gov drones and civilian RC fighters…….
They have to be communicating with the ground. I suspect some knowledge and an RF scanner could pinpoint when one is in range.
But I know jack about such things so I’m talking out of my ass.
We already lost a surveillance drone due to hacking. Either the hackers couldn’t fly it, or didn’t have the equipment to fly it and it crashed.
As far as finding one in flight, there is at least one common denominator among all aircraft that makes them susceptible to being tracked, including the Stealth line of aircraft. Iran claims to have this technology. I searched Google and couldn’t find a reference to the technology, so I can only assume it is still classified however, National Defense University has a paper out on a similar technology. http://www.ndu.edu/press/lib/images/jfq-55/22.pdf
Without talking out of school, the DHS bird didn’t have NEAR the same level of encryption and fail safes of our military grade UAS. It’s still a valid point and I am increasingly alarmed at the continued rise of military grade equipment against American citizens here at home.
I would be ashamed if they didn’t. Still this was just a class project done on the cheap. Just imagine what a Taliban force could do when they have access to both Opium money and Eastern European Back-Hat Hackers.
The scale of the operation goes both ways!