Samy Kamkar asks, wouldn’t it be great to hijack Amazon’s delivery drones?
“How fun would it be to take over drones, carrying Amazon packages,” asks SkyJack creator Samy Kamkar, “or take over any other drones and make them my little zombie drones?” Kamkar would know, as his SkyJack can intercept Parrot drones mid-air and take over flight control and cameras, turning the victim into a zombie. See the video to make all your robot army nightmares come true!
The Parrot drone is one of the more popular commercial makes, with over 500,000 sold since its 2010 launch. The attacker need have no prior knowledge of the victim, since Parrots support no encryption and have to be controlled via an open network. They’re even required to use specific MAC addresses, all of which are publicly available online. That makes them easy targets.
Kamkar has already published SkyJack’s hardware and software specs online. If you’re wondering where you’ve heard the name Samy Kamkar before, he created the Samy XSS worm that smacked MySpace, back in 2006. That exploit earned Kamkar a visit from the Secret Service, and he later pled out on a felony charge.
“SkyJack also works when grounded as well, no drone is necessary on your end for it to work,” says Kamkar. “You can simply run it from your own Linux machine/Raspberry Pi/laptop/etc and jack drones straight out of the sky.” Amazon must be thrilled.
Source: Ars Technica
