Pierluigi Paganini July 31, 2016

A security duo designed a hacking UAV dubbed Danger Drone, with it a drone equipped with a tiny PC that run a suite of hacking tools.

What do you think if I propose you to use a drone to hack into a network? And what about air-gapped networks hacking?

In order to hack into an isolated network, the attacker needs to bypass the physical security measures implemented for its protection.

The use of drone could allow hackers to access an the isolated and well-protected infrastructure, but an attacker needs to place in the vicinity of the target a device with the computational ability to launch the attack.

Take a Raspberry and mount it on a drone, load a suite of hacking tools on the tiny PC and … you have built a Danger Drone. The authors of the Danger Drone, Fran Brown and his colleague David Latimer, are offering for sale the custom made UAV for $500.

“Think of it as a flying hacker laptop,” Fran Brown, one of the creators, told to Motherboard.

The Danger Drone has a 1.2 mile range but its range could be extended by controlling it via LTE with a special mobile module.

The Danger Drone can also be programmed with fixed waypoints and landing destinations.

The Danger Drone could be used by hackers like a sort of mobile computer that could be moved close to the network to hack and launch the attack by using the hacking suite it equips.

“Attacks that before people might not have done because people didn’t want to put themselves personally at risk of getting caught—this kinda removes that,” added Brown. “Now you can be a lot more brazen in your attacks, because you’re not as worried about getting caught and going to jail.”

The authors intend to offer the drone to cyber security experts and pen tester that need to evaluate the physical security of their infrastructure.

As Lorenzo Bicchierai notes in his article, most exposed to cyber attack launched from the Danger Drone are the IoT devices.

“The explosion of the Internet of Things has really put a lot of targets out there for this drone,” said Brown.

Of course, the Danger Drone could represent a serious threat in the wrong hands, crooks could use it to hack into a critical infrastructure. In the article published by Mother Board are mentioned also other illegal use such as flying it around the neighborhood to automatically hijack Chromecasts.

The drone will be presented at the next Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas next week.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Danger Drone, hacking)