The idea of drones being used in the United States has several people up in arms over privacy, the Fourth Amendment and a “Big Brother” type government. While these issues are important to the debate on drones, there is one even more vital issue with drones that few like to discuss. That issue is the ability of a hacker to penetrate drone defenses and be able to gain control of a drone’s visual and weapons capability. The idea of a drone armed with Hellfire missile flying over US soil being controlled by a terrorist or another organization is frightening.
And the truth is, that these attempts are being made right now to do so. Recently, a concerted effort nicknamed, Operation Beebus sent several official looking emails to US Government officials in the form of a holiday greeting from the White House. This type of attack is dubbed a spear-phishing attack and in this case, it was sent to any and all government officials who have anything to do with the drone operations in the USA. It was also sent to several agencies, aerospace, defense and the telecom industry. Once the link for the picture of a smiling First Lady and her husband is clicked, it installs a ‘backdoor’ onto the computer. This backdoor embeds itself into the computer as a DLL file in the Windows directory.
The ‘backdoor’ pretends to be software from Google or Microsoft which makes detection virtually impossible as it lays dormant and does not affect the computer in anyway other than to allow the hacker access to the computer at a later date. Fire-Eye Labs has linked these attacks to an organization called the Comment Group, which is a Chinese activist group. These targeted attacks leave the US open and vulnerable to physical terrorist attacks. So, US will definitely plan strategies for this as well and execute them accordingly.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Leave your comment