AnonSec Attempts To Crash $222m Drone, Releases Secret Flight Videos (ibtimes.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from IBTimes that says it's not just governments that have proven themselves capable of hacking into drones: Hackers from the AnonSec group who spent several months hacking NASA have released a huge data dump and revealed they tried to bring down a $222m Global Hawk drone into the Pacific Ocean. The hack included employee personal details, flight logs and video footage collected from unmanned and manned aircraft. The 250GB data dump contained the names, email addresses and phone numbers of 2,414 NASA employees, 2,143 flight logs and 631 videos taken from Nasa aircraft and radar feeds, as well as a self-published paper (known as a 'zine') from the group explaining the extensive technical vulnerabilities that the hackers were able to breach. Among these: the group discovered that the flight paths uploaded into each drone could be replaced with their own.

Comments

Re:Best way to stop these criminals

[bkr1_2k]

The problem is they couldn't actually do either action. This is a bunch of hype trying to claim greater "hacking" capability than they actually have. Hell, even the article says they gained access by purchasing it from someone else.

Having worked on those aircraft for the better part of 10 years, these guys didn't do a damn thing. The mission plans would have been noticed immediately as using the wrong waypoints and been corrected, manually or from known-good files. These guys didn't have a chance of actually crashing anything except maybe a couple of servers at NASA, which would have done nothing.

NASA clearly needs to update some of their Network security protocols and probably fire a couple of people, but this is a non-story with respect to the drones. It's FUD trying to drive site clicks.