How To Hijack a Drone For $400 In Less Than an Hour

Trailrunner7 writes "The skies may soon be full of drones – some run by law enforcement agencies, others run by intelligence agencies and still others delivering novels and cases of diapers from Amazon. But a new project by a well-known hacker Samy Kamkar may give control of those drones to anyone with $400 and an hour of free time. Small drones, like the ones that Amazon is planning to use to deliver small packages in short timeframes in a few years, are quite inexpensive and easy to use. They can be controlled from an iPhone, tablet or Android device and can be modified fairly easily, as well. Kamkar, a veteran security researcher and hacker, has taken advantage of these properties and put together his own drone platform, called Skyjack. The drone has the ability to forcibly disconnect another drone from its controller and then force the target to accept commands from the Skyjack drone. All of this is done wirelessly and doesn't require the use of any exploit or security vulnerability."

Comments

Skyjack only works for WiFi drones!

[cciRRus]

While pro-grade multicopters like those to be deployed by Amazon operate at 2.4GHz, they do not use WiFi as their radio system! Typically, these multicopters are fitted radio systems such as Futaba, JR, Spektrum or 9X, and therefore Skyjack will not be able to take them down.