Friday, December 6, 2013

"Zombie" drone can control other drones (video)

Serial hacker Samy Kamkar has released all the hardware and software specifications for people to build an aerial drone that finds other drones in the air, hacks them, and turns them into an army of unmanned vehicles under the attacker's control.

"How fun would it be to take over drones, carrying Amazon packages... or take over any other drones and make them my little zombie drones," Kamkar asked rhetorically in a blog post published Monday. "Awesome."

Called SkyJack, the technology uses a radio-controlled Parrot AR.Drone quadcopter carrying a Raspberry Pi circuit board, a small battery, and two wireless transmitters.

The devices run a combination of custom software and off-the-shelf applications that seek out wireless signals of nearby Parrot drones, hijack the wireless connections used to control them, and commandeer the victims' flight-control and camera systems.

SkyJack will also run on land-based Linux devices and hack drones within radio range. At least 500,000 Parrot drones have been sold since the model was introduced in 2010.

Kamkar is the creator of the infamous Samy worm, a complex piece of JavaScript that knocked MySpace out of commission in 2005 when the exploit added more than one million MySpace friends to Kamkar's account. Kamkar was later convicted for the stunt.

For more of the Ars Technica story: arstechnica.com

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