The Rise of Robotics – Time to rethink Security

The Rise of Robotics – Time to rethink Security

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drone

The rise of robotics is bringing with it many apprehensions regarding security. A book that has come out recently “Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It” by Marc Goodman, constitutes a mine of examples of what, in particular, we can start worrying about.

There’s the example from late 2009, when a US Predator drone flew over the skies of Iraq. The drone pilots were stationed as far off as Nevada, intently watching the live video feeds. As it turned out some Shia militants where watching these feeds too. Using a $26 piece of Russian hacker software known as SkyGrabber, the insurgents were able to intercept the video footage. When the militants saw their house coming into close video focus, they knew it was time to move.

Then there is the example of a couple of University of Texas students who discovered a way to hack UAVs used to protect the US southern border. They called the Department of Homeland Security to share this information, but needed to demonstrate seizing the flying robot and flying it off course before they were believed. The DHS people were sure their UAV was “unhackable”.

The Texas University incident was back in 2012. The students’ professor, Todd Humphreys then told the DHS that, “in five or ten years we’ve got 30,000 drones inhabiting the national airspace…  Each one of these could be a potential missile to be used against us.” The students had carried out their attack by spoofing the drone’s GPS and changing its coordinates, using hardware and software they had built at school for under $1,000.

And who can forget the time an American UAV fell into Iranian hands back in Dec. 2011? The capture of the drone and its classified technology was a significant intelligence coup for the Iranians, and was covered by headlines worldwide. According to Defense One  the Iranians had successfully used the same technique as did the University of Texas students. They jammed the communication links of the American RQ-170 Sentinel drone overflying Iran, and forced it into autopilot mode. Instead of following its programming and returning to its base in Afghanistan, the Iranians spoofed the UAV’s GPS signals and flew it into the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The thing is we don’t have to worry only about drones being hacked. Terrorists are turning to robots as weapons, and they aren’t limited to consumer-grade UAVs with small payloads. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorists have deployed VBIEDs  (vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices), commonly known as car bombs, to destroy multiple buildings and rock entire neighborhoods, with some vehicles’ containing  up to seven thousand  pounds of explosives.

Videos shown on YouTube, such as DIY remote-controlled flying robots, or drones being flown with stun guns on board, constitute information that can be fatally misused.  YouTube also has plenty of videos where real guns are used. The earliest video of an actual firearm, a .45-caliber handgun, mounted and firing on a remote-control helicopter appeared in a video way back in 2008 and this trend only seems to ‘evolve’.

When you can use a smart phone to shoot an actual gun mounted on a flying robot that costs only a few hundred dollars, it means the shooter video games have just entered three- dimensional space and become a reality.