Hacker Says $40 and He Can Take Control of Expensive Drones

[Jubalr]

Just $40 in parts to steal a drone..

 

[Pedals2Paddles]

Greatly exagerated fear mongering as usual. This article will have you think that police, fire, EMS, and military drones are flying around everywhere, just waiting to be electronically hijacked. This is obviously not the case. And large scale custom drone is probably also not using WiFi at all to begin with.

 

[PdxSteve]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the RQ-170 Sentinel UAV that Iran hacked and hijacked in the air wasn't using wifi lol.

 

[Pedals2Paddles]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the RQ-170 Sentinel UAV that Iran hacked and hijacked in the air wasn't using wifi lol.

My understanding of that is it was not hacked at all. The control frequencies was jammed, not hacked. That causes it go into a failsafe return to home, just like our stuff already does. Then GPS spoofing was used to make it think it was landing back at it's home base. Nothing was hacked. The only reason this worked, is they rightly assumed what it was likely programmed for as a home base location.

Of course, that's mostly conjecture since neither the US or Iranians are making official statements about how that happened

 

[PdxSteve]

Ok, spoofing gps to fool a piece of equipment in order to trigger preprogrammed protocols isn't technically hacking. sheesh