

Texas college students hijack drone aircraft - omarali
http://www.geek.com/news/texas-college-students-hijack-drone-aircraft-1500045/

======
Domenic_S
Other discussion frontpaged a year ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4212319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4212319)

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Jaqua
Why is this story back on Hacker news? There was additional analysis on this
here: [http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/07/02/drone-
hackedwith-...](http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/07/02/drone-
hackedwith-1000-spoofer/) and here
[http://video.foxnews.com/v/1706007795001/hackers-put-us-
dron...](http://video.foxnews.com/v/1706007795001/hackers-put-us-drone-fleet-
in-danger)

~~~
DanBC
1) Duplicates happen, especially with many outlets covering the same story.

2) It's a weekend, thus easier to get back onto HN.

3) People might be upvoting almost anything that isn't NSA / Snowden.

~~~
Jaqua
I just posted one Snowden link, I guess it's over covered.. :)

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ionwake
Please correct me if I am wrong - but is the last sentence in the article
completely wrong?

" It is currently illegal to use drone aircraft in US airspace without special
clearance from the FAA, and it might take a little longer than expected for
that to change. "

Did they meant to say "legal"?

~~~
paxswill
Nope. Unmanned aircraft currently have to have a line of sight to the operator
and stay below 400 feet unless they have an exemption from the FAA. NPR did a
story on this a week ago [0], which also has a link to the FAA's status page
for unmanned aircraft [1]

0:
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/06/13/190369...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/06/13/190369460/Guidelines-
For-Commercial-Drones-Expect-To-Come-By-2015)

1:
[http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/](http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/)

------
electromagnetic
Can someone explain this to me like I'm five, because what I'm taking from
"unencrypted GPS data" is that the military controls these drones by basically
pushing coordinates, and gaining control could be as simple as broadcasting
your signal a heck of a lot louder?

~~~
mh-
Reuters[1] published a correction clarifying that the UAV in question was
owned by the university. It wasn't a military drone. The article on Sophos[2]
site also says this.

Military GPS signals are encrypted[3]. 'Hijacking' a drone that relies on the
civilian signal is an interesting technical accomplishment but offers _no
progress_ towards doing the same thing to an aircraft using the military band.

[1] [http://rt.com/usa/texas-1000-us-
government-906/](http://rt.com/usa/texas-1000-us-government-906/)

[2] [http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/07/02/drone-
hackedwith-...](http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/07/02/drone-
hackedwith-1000-spoofer/)

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Commu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Communication)

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BMarkmann
I find it a little strange that they outsourced penetration testing like this.
(Although maybe they already understood the system's vulnerabilities and
wanted to see how hard it was for someone else to do it.)

~~~
diminoten
What's so strange? Pen testing is almost always outsoruced.

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mikescoffield
This reminds me of an episode of Castle.

