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."

Re:Simple: just turn off the wireless

[Fnord666]

Actually I'm still wondering if the drone would be smart enough to land on pavement or miss entirely and drop packages on a customer roof or balcony

Hopefully they don't use the code that delivers care packages in Call of Duty then.

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Re:Simple: just turn off the wireless

[Dan541]

I'm curious to know how it will handle apartments, though.

A cannon to launch the parcel through the window?

Re: Here we go...

[Badblackdog]

If you like your drones... You may keep your drones...

Re:Stealing an Amazon Drone

[hairyfish]

There's is a whole order of magnitude more effort involved in hijacking and stealing a truck than knocking a drone out of the sky. Especially since an unexpected drone crash is a very high risk anyway. If I see one of these things I'll be hitting tennis balls at them purely for shits and giggles. If they happen to be in the way of my game of backyard cricket then fuck them.