(Times of Israel) David Shamah - Israel's decision to shoot down the Hizbullah drone only after it flew into Israeli airspace for 20-30 minutes may have been part of an attempt to hack into the UAV and gain intelligence on it. "Anything with an operating system can be hacked," said Israeli security expert Shai Rod, a top administrator for Avnet, one of Israel's largest security firms. "Hackers could hijack a surveillance session, feeding false information directly into the drone for transmission back to headquarters." They could also compromise the drone's GPS system, providing inaccurate information about where the drone is located and what it is seeing. Hackers could even get control of a drone's avionics, controlling its flight path. Viruses could be inserted into the drone's operating system for uploading to the server that it communicates with. Drone hackers could cause a denial-of-service attack to the server the drone is communicating with. Or they could reverse-engineer the drone's operating system to determine who sent it, and where it is sending the data. An ambitious hacker could even upload a Trojan horse, to infect a larger system.
2012-10-16 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive