Published: 27 June, 2012, 22:30, RT
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.
Humphrey
tells Fox News that for a few hundreds dollar his team was able to “spoof” the
GPS system on board the DHS drone, a technique that involves mimicking the
actual signals sent to the global positioning device and then eventually
tricking the target into following a new set of commands. And, for just $1,000,
Humphreys says the spoofer his team assembled was the most advanced one ever
built.
“Spoofing
a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane,” Humphreys
tells Fox. The real danger here, however, is that the government is currently
considering plans that will allow local law enforcement agencies and other
organizations from coast-to-coast to control drones of their own in America’s
airspace.
“In five
or ten years you have 30,000 drones in the airspace,” he
tells Fox News. “Each
one of these could be a potential missile used against us.”
Domestic
drones are already being used by the DHS and other governmental agencies, and
several small-time law enforcement groups have accumulated UAVs of their own as
they await clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration. Indeed, by 2020
there expects to betens of thousands of drones diving and dipping through US
airspace. With that futuristic reality only a few years away, Humphreys’
experiment suggests that the FAA may have their work cut out for them if they
think it’s as easy as just approving domestic use anytime soon. After all,
reports Newser, domestic drones are likely to use the same unencrypted GPS
signals provided to civilians, allowing seemingly anyone with $1,000 and the
right research to hack into the system and harness a UAV for their own personal
use.
“What if
you could take down one of these drones delivering FedEx packages and use that
as your missile?”Humphreys asks. “That’s
the same mentality the 9-11 attackers had,”
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