Hi.
I am reading the “Drone Code” and there is a statement under Section 9 that states “Keeping this software up to date will also help to protect against cyber attacks”. Has there been any evidence that a private user has had their drone software hacked?
Yes, I agree with “possible” - it would depend on the drone manufacturer’s technology. Someone could design an injection code, but surely that would need to be injected at source. Is traffic from the firmwear servers at, let’s say, DJI encrypted? I would hope so. But then we have seen instances where the US military weren’t encrypting traffic to their drones and a foreign power managed to take control.
Once again, the code seems to be trying to predict future scenarios using a generalized non-technical understanding of the technology. Of course, I could be completely wrong here, I know that they seem to have been in consultation for a while before publishing this, they could have spoken with people who had way more understanding of the subject matter.
I know the hacked excuse has been used when someone loses control and crashes. It’s a similar technique that traditional model flyers use when they dirt nap their model plane but instead claim there must have been a transmitter glitch, unless you’re using Spektrum gear then yes you had a transmitter glitch.
Nidge.
Dont know about drones but I watched a program on hackers a few years back and they had an actual “freindly” hacker, he told the story how they had found a flaw with the crysler model of car where a hacker could via wi fi from home hack the car and take control of it, steering,brakes engine everything, they contacted crysler to let them know and 6 months later the fault still existed so they gave the company 7 days unless they would attack putting the cars out of action until the company fixed it, they did so withing 24 hours !!!
A scarey thought though there may be other cars out there with this so a drone then I would say yes.
The hacker shown the reported how he could control the car by hacking it live taking control from the driver.
I know of scenarios where a “hijacker” can take control if they are on the same frequency and using a more powerful transmitter and are closer the UAV than the original pilot. In effect they overpower the control signal.
However, that was a number of years back and I would have expected that newer systems would use an encrypted transmission with a verification key token. That would be established between transmitter and receiver prior to take off and when the transmitter and receiver do their initial “handshake”.
