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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.
How much of a hack is it, when the basic understanding of their servers, is bought from someone from either within or a former member of the I.T. team? "AnonSec explains that it purchased an "initial foothold" from a hacker with knowledge of Nasa's servers in 2013"
They're not terrorists. They're criminals, yes, and idiots too, but their intent was not to cause terror. Yes they should be arrested, but let's stop labeling every extreme action "terrorism" when that's obviously not the intent.
What an ignorant comment. NASA is using these drones for scientific missions. Among other things, they take measurements of the ozone layer, collect data on transport of aerosols and pollutants over the Pacific (which undoubtedly impacts the weather on the west coast), and collects data on developing Atlantic hurricanes. Just because something isn't particularly secure doesn't mean you should hack it. I'd bet that the signals sent to the Voyager spacecraft and probably the Mars rovers don't use strong encryption. I'd bet if someone put their mind to it, they could spoof the signals sent to them. It would also be a dick move to interfere with valuable scientific missions just because you want to hack something. I understand the concept of hacktivism but this isn't it. That you consider NASA's atmospheric research your enemy says more than enough about you.
More high quality products developed by private industry for the US Govt...
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Who built it? Irrelevant. What products were used? Irrelevant. It was shown to be secured by simply changing the default passwords, and leaving default passwords intact was a failure of management. So what kind of network is it, anyway? Oh, yeah, it's a .gov network. Management is controlled by the .gov entity, even if contractors are used for the keypresses and network cable enplugginations. The .gov entity is responsible for regular security audits on their systems. They failed on that management aspect.