Parrot Drone Shown To Be Vulnerable To Hacking

Drones are all the rage at the moment and I suppose that it was only a matter of time before the security that drones have or don’t have became an issue. In the case of the Parrot AR Drone, it’s insecure according to “white hat hacker” Ryan Satterfield who posted this video showing what he did to pwn the drone:

So, what he did was the following:

  • The drone has open WiFi that anyone can access. I can verify that as the Parrot products that I have reviewed including the one that Satterfield used in this video were completely open for anyone to find.
  • He used the UNIX command “Telnet” to get into the drone because that too is wide open for anyone to find.
  • Once he connected, he was able to use the UNIX command “Kill 1″ to terminate the process that controls the operation of the drone. Once terminated, the drone falls from the sky.

So in theory, you could use this method to hijack the drone and take control of it. Then you could do anything you want. That’s scary if you think about it.

After showing details of the hack at DEF CON 23, Satterfield said that he contacted Parrot about the vulnerabilities that he used. The response from the company was that it was aware of them. But it’s not clear whether Parrot intends to fix them or not. Now that these are out in the open, I suspect they’ll have a really big incentive to do so.

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