If you're psyched about Amazon's scheme to someday have unmanned drones deliver products to your doorstep, scale your excitement back a couple notches. Not only is FAA approval of such a service still a ways off, Amazon's plan potentially faces one more hurdle: hacker attack drones.
As crazy as that might sound, well, just keep reading.
"Serial hacker" Samy Kamkar -- who was apparently responsible for knocking MySpace offline for a period in 2005 -- has created something he calls the SkyJack. It's an aerial drone that seeks out other drones, hacks them and then essentially takes control over them.
Running a combination of custom software and other easily available applications on a Raspberry Pi circuit board, the SkyJack seeks out the wireless signals of nearby drones, hijacks the connections used to control them and commandeer the victims' flight-control and camera systems, according to a report from Ars Technica.
Here, Kamkar explains SkyJack's technical details:
What's more, Kamkar has made public all the tech specifications that anyone needs to build an aerial hacker drone of their very own.
So, imagine all those Amazon drones buzzing overhead being turned into zombies by one rogue drone, and all of our packages winding up in the hands of some criminal. Hopefully delivery drones don't take to the skies without some serious security measures in place first.
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