Check out the new SourceForge HTML5 internet speed test! No Flash necessary and runs on all devices. Also, Slashdot's Facebook page has a chat bot now. Message it for stories and more. 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." AR Drone Navigation Board AR Drone Motor Controller This blog page is dedicated to the motors of the AR Drone. You can download an on-drone c program (source+compiled) to control the motors and leds. Whenever the motor controller detects a problem, it will stop running and toggles the IRQ pin. A rising edge to 5v on the IRQ pin sets GPIO 106 (i.e. `gpio 106 -r` returns 1). Pin 106 can be reset to 0 by toggling GPIO 107, i.e. `gpio 107 -d ho 0; gpio 107 -d ho 1`. In other words this is a flipflop circuit, with Set=IRQ, Reset=GPIO107 and Data=GPIO106. Baud rate: 115200, 8n1 Configuiration sent to single motor. The motor is selected with GPIO 68 to 71. Sent to all motors. (as used by program.elf) for x=1 to 4 TX E0, RX 2 bytes TX 91, RX 121 bytes TX A1, RX 3 bytes TX 00+x, RX 1 byte TX 40, RX 12 bytes CS1_,CS2_,CS3_,CS4_ Low (select all)

for x=1 to 6 TX A0 -> RX 1 byte 001aaaaa aaaabbbb bbbbbccc ccccccdd ddddddd0 a,b,c,d = 9 bits for motor 1,2,3,4 (msb first) transmitted every 5ms (200Hz) every 80ms send 2x + one 8x code The following script initializes the motor and starts the control loop. The control loop flashes all leds. The script has been tested as replacement for program.elf on a AR.Drone with firmware version 1.7.4 and 1.3.3, motor software version 1.20 and 1.11, motor hardware version 3.0, motor supplier 1.1 and 2.2. © 2015 Tech Toy Hacks Suffusion theme by Sayontan SinhaShort Bytes: Drones with video cameras have given us the power to record amazing clips. However, these drones have also elevated the privacy invasion risk as they could be used as a perfect surveillance tool. To make you aware of the risks involved, here’s a Make: project that shows how one can kill Wi-Fi drones with Raspberry Pi and Linux. With more and more quadcopters with high-quality video recording capability coming at an affordable price, we are able to make better videos with the bird’s eye view.

However, at the same time, these unmanned aircraft systems have posed new threats to our privacy and security. As a result, in recent times, we have seen a new type of industry mushrooming on the horizon — anti-drone technology. On the same track, in this article, I’ll tell you about a way to make your Wi-Fi drone disabler with your favorite DIY partner Raspberry Pi.turbo drone quadcopter instructions Disclaimer: The information shared here is only for educational purpose. miami dade police department droneThese techniques should only be performed on the devices and networks you own. parrot ar drone en mexicoNote that it’s illegal to harm property of others and we take no responsibility for your actions.parrot ar drone for hunting

For many current drones, Wi-Fi is an important aspect as it’s used as a controller interface between drone, controller, or some other screen displaying different data. In a detailed article, Make: has outlined a way to attack Parrot’s AR.Drone 2.0 by exploring its weakness through a Raspberry Pi with a small screen to access Linux terminal. ar drone 2 calibrationParrot’s drone comes with lots of sensors that could be targeted and manipulated.parrot ar drone spare parts uk The tutorial tells that the drone acts an access point that is hacked using a couple of scripts and a short telnet session. That’s all needed to be done to kill a drone.Drone 2.0 is so hackable, in fact, that there are communities and competitions focused on modifying this particular drone,” the tutorial explains. To extend your range and ensure a boosted Wi-Fi connectivity, the tutorial also makes a DIY Cantenna, a homemade directional antenna.

Note that this hack doesn’t apply to all drones, but looking for open gates in made in China drones isn’t much difficult. fossBytes advises you to use this tutorial as a guide to educate yourself and ensure the safety of your devices. Are you ready to hack? Your Raspberry Pi starter kit is here!If you were watching Iranian state TV in early December 2011, you would have seen an unusual flying object paraded in front of viewers. Windowless, squat, with a pointed nose, its two wings made it the shape of a manta ray. The trophy on show was an RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone, a key weapon in the intelligence gathering arsenal of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Standing in a hangar on a military airfield, the drone was seemingly undamaged. Indeed, Iranian officials insisted that it had not been shot down; rather, they claimed an unusual coup: to have hacked the drone while it was flying near Iran’s border over Afghanistan and forced it to land.Outside Iran, many snorted in disbelief at hearing such claims.

Todd Humphreys, assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas in Austin, US, was one of the sceptics. Soon, though, he would prove himself wrong.So, how easy is it to hack a drone? Along with the military, could police and private citizens also lose control of their aircraft? And if so, what might a hacker do with a stolen drone?One way to hack a drone involves messing with the system it uses to navigate. US military drones use encrypted frequencies of the Global Positioning System (GPS), and this was the RQ-170’s Achilles heel, said the Iranians. They first jammed its communications links, which disconnected it from ground controllers and made it switch to autopilot; it also interrupted the secure data flow from the GPS satellites. The drone was forced to search for unencrypted GPS frequencies normally used by commercial aircraft. At this point, the Iranians said, they used a technique called “spoofing” – sending the plane wrong GPS coordinates, tricking it into believing that it was near its home base in Afghanistan.

And so it landed on Iranian territory, directly into the welcoming arms of its kidnappers.The US rejected the hacking scenario, insisting that its flying robot simply had malfunctioned. Military drones usually have a back-up system to guide them home automatically if contact with operators is lost. But that clearly didn’t work. View image of Drone flies in front of soldiers (Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images) (Credit: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images) The more Humphreys thought about the incident, the more he felt that such an attack might work, at least in theory. Together with students at his university’s Radionavigation Lab, which he directs, he invited the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to watch how his team could spoof a civilian drone mid-air.Using equipment costing less than $2,000, Humphreys mimicked the unencrypted signals sent to the GPS receiver on board a small university-owned drone. With DHS officials watching, he managed to fool the drone in a matter of minutes to follow his commands.

“I first dismissed the Iranians’ claims as extremely unlikely, but have since revised my estimate to ‘remotely plausible’,” he says.Jamming GPS satellite signals “so the drone's sense of its own location begins to drift away from the truth” is quite doable for both military and commercial drones, he says, because these signals are so weak. “The US military is scrambling right now to reduce their drones' susceptibility to GPS jamming, but it's going to take some time before they've got a satisfactory fix.”There are other vulnerabilities, too. Intercepting data links from the drone, such as knowing precisely what the plane is looking at, is also easy to do if the feeds are not encrypted. In 2008, Iraqi militants intercepted unencrypted video feeds from unmanned US spy planes. And in 2012, drones at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada were reportedly infected with malware after an operator apparently had used a drone’s computer to play “Mafia Wars” – and in the process installed a virus on the PC.

A military drone hacked by criminals is obviously a dangerous scenario. But what if hackers were to gain control of civilian flying robots? Drones are already being exploited for search and rescue organisations, police authorities for surveillance, or for crop or wildlife monitoring, for example, and they may soon be joined by postal services and online retailers. View image of Parrot AR drone (Wikimedia) (Credit: Wikimedia) Independent IT security analyst Samy Kamkar showed that taking control of a civilian drone was possible in December 2013. He equipped a Parrot AR Drone 2.0 with a tiny Raspberry Pi computer, a battery and two wireless transmitters. The microcomputer ran a simple piece of software, which directed the drone to search for the wi-fi signals used to control nearby Parrot drones. Once his drone had found a victim, the program used the wireless transmitters to sever the target drone’s link to its owner and took control. According to Kamkar, a handheld computer on the ground can do the trick too.

Humphreys calls Kamkar’s work “a clever hack” and predicts that “it won't be the last one against commercial drones; hackers will find flaws and exploit them.”David Mascarenas, who works for the National Security Education Center at Los Alamos National Labs, agrees. As drones are nothing but flying computers, he says they “have the potential to exhibit never before seen security flaws that couple both cyber and physical security concerns.”Yet what would be the motivation for a hacker to take control of a civilian drone?“The reason to hack a drone would be like any other reason people hack,” says Peter Singer, director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings Institution, a think-tank based in Washington DC. “It might be to cause an act of terror, an act of mischief, to carry out some kind of crime, or the “white hat” type, to show that it can be done in order to warn others of the vulnerabilities.” View image of DHL delivery drone (Andreas Rentz/Getty Images) (Credit: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)

Delivery drones could be hacked to steal their cargo, the expensive machine itself, or even to encourage black market activities. “If a drone can deliver a book, it can also be used to deliver narcotics” or sneak contraband into a prison, says Mascarenas. Indeed a drone has already been used for smuggling cigarettes into a prison yard in Georgia, US.Another example might be corporate espionage. A drone that normally operates within a factory could be redirected and tagged with a tiny broadcasting camera, allowing a hacker to spy on sensitive commercial information.Then there may simply be people who don’t want drones spying on them. One town in Colorado has already proposed drone “hunting licences” that would allow people to shoot down drones. While Humphreys says the idea is farcical, the anti-surveillance sentiment behind it is real. “If I saw an unfamiliar drone snooping around my back yard, you can bet I'd be sorely tempted to jam its GPS receiver to shoo it away – or bring it down,” he says.