Displaying items by tag: GPS Spoofing

Yesterday we wrote an article where we described how a military drone could be hacked through the use of GPS spoofing. This morning we received an email from one of the people involved in the actual event with some clarifications. First despite original reports (and some addition information we were given) the drone that was used for the demonstration was not a military class drone. It was one that the University of Texas purchased. It is still fairly sophisticated and is the same kind used by law enforcement. The team did this to point out serious issues with commercial drones before there is a rewrite of the FAA rules governing this new class of vehicles. You can check out the original story about for more information on the hack.

**********UPDATE 7/1/2012 - We have heard from Both Vanguard Defense Industries and Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas. The Drone in quesstion was NOT purchased from Vanguard. The University of Texas declined to state how they did purchase it from, but commented that the vulnerability exists in any drone that uses Civil GPS systems. ******************

Although the media world seems shocked by the news that the unmanned drones in use by the military are vulnerable to cyber-attacks we wonder exactly why. I mean come on how many security breaches of high-level “secured” sites have to happen before someone gets it? There really is no such thing as a secure system. This has been shown time and again going back to the first encryption methods. If you have some access to the system you can get in.