Raspberry Pi Used To Hijack Drone Over Wi-Fi

Drones made by a major manufacturer of the flying machines could be hacked by using a Raspberry Pi device, a charger and a wireless transmitter.

Researcher Samy Kamkar attached the pocket-sized computer, the battery and the transmitter to a Parrot AR.Drone 2. It then scans for any MAC addresses of Parrot drones in the vicinity, before de-authenticating them using the aircrack-ng software, cutting the owner off from the machine.

Kamkar found he could then take over the drone, using JavaScript and node.js commands executed from his Linux OS on Raspberry Pi to control it.

He theorised this technique could be used to create a small army of “zombie drones”.

‘Skyjacking’ drones

He has made the “Skyjack” code publicly available on Github, meaning anyone could now target a Parrot drone without having to spend or think too much.

“SkyJack also works when grounded as well, no drone is necessary on your end for it to work. You can simply run it from your own Linux machine/Raspberry Pi/laptop/etc and jack drones straight out of the sky,” Kamkar noted.

Parrot had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

The release came in the week that Amazon announced it is trialling the use of drones to deliver packages. “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. Awesome,” Kamkar wrote in his blog post on the hack.

Drones are in use across the world, either as gadgets amongst consumers, or by military and law enforcement. Many are concerned about their impact on privacy, especially in areas where police are using them to monitor people.

Even Google chairman Eric Schmidt expressed his concerns about civilian drones earlier this year.

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