We live in an historic period of cyberpunk . Whether it ’s jerk payment and recognition board information from large retailer , nobble personnel information from the U.S. government or snatching a gem trove of juicyemails , remuneration information and unreleased films from Sony Pictures , the ignominious hats are out there and they ’re strain to get in . Everything is a likely target , and that includes drones . Hackers have develop malware designed to infiltrate and overtake the small quadcopters that you might find hovering around your local parking lot or finally dropping off yourAmazonpackages . They ’ve also come up with a way to bring down the high up - poweredunmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs ) increasingly engage by military force [ generator : de Looper , Sternstein ] .
Maldrone is a type of malware specifically direct at UAVs and intended to hack into drone via Internet connections . Drones , after all , are fundamentally flying reckoner . As such , they ’re susceptible to the same eccentric of nag as a laptop or smartphone . Drone hack engineering can be used to either pinch the datum that the machines hoard or even take over their strong-arm control [ sources : de Looper , Sternstein , Moskovitch ] .
SkyJack , for example , looks like a run of the mill drone , but is designed to hunt down other UAVs , hack into them and verify them . In other Holy Writ , it could potentially be used to amass a fleet of zombie spirit drones . Samy Kamkar , the hacker behind the cyberspace insect that crippled MySpace in 2005 , has in public free the specs for the SkyJack pilotless aircraft , giving hacker all the info they need to build up their own versions . The machine run on software that conduct it to locate other drones within a sure area and take over their ascendence by severing the drones ' Internet connexion with its rightful possessor [ source : Crook ] .
Meanwhile , military drone cyber-terrorist seem to bring down UAVs by confusing them . Iranian officials , for example , say that they were able-bodied to ground a U.S. Air Force drone flying along the land ’s border with Afghanistan in tardy 2011 by control itsglobal placement system(GPS ) . It ’s believed that the hackers first jammed the drone ’s communication links , leaving it unable to send and receive data and controls to and from operators on the ground . The move also unplug the drone from the GPS system that it used to coordinate its way . As the pilotless aircraft swap to autopilot control , it also went looking for unencrypted GPS frequencies . The hacker send the radio-controlled aircraft " spoof " coordinates that led the machine to think that it was tight to its nursing home base in Afghanistan . rather , the machine landed in Iran [ source : Moskvitch , Sternstein ] .
The spoofing onslaught has led to an sleeve race of sort , with military drone outfits scrambling to squawk up their protection against hack . Among other moves , experts recommend hide the exact positions of GPS receivers to make them more difficult to turn up . The U.S. military is presently working with Boeing to develop a " cyberpunk - proof " trailer which would shield its onboard communication system from likely attacks . The calculator operate on a newprogramming languagethat creators say is less vulnerable to hack . At least for the time being [ rootage : Sternstein , Sternstein ] .
