Drone enthusiasts are performing all sorts of maneuvers and modifications with their drones, while companies push authorities to speed up approvals for commercial uses. However, this surge in popularity also makes drones a tempting target, catching the interest of malicious developers. Today we’ll see Maldrone, a malware that can hijack a drone, or even worse, bring it down in a matter of seconds.
Drones have raised a conflict similar to the one seen with Google Glass. When used in open spaces, there doesn’t seem to be any problem, but if a drone starts flying over homes and schools, the situation changes completely, especially if it has an integrated camera. From a legal standpoint, drones represent a problem that must be handled with extreme care. Excessive regulation could negatively affect the entire model aircraft community, but it wouldn’t be logical to leave them free of responsibility either. In recent months, drones have shown not only several legal aspects to be defined, but also security details that need urgent correction. I imagine government variants have multiple protection mechanisms, but in commercial models, factory configurations leave much to be desired.
A New Threat Takes Flight
The malware is named Maldrone, its victim is the Parrot AR.Drone, and the creator of this “payload” is researcher Rahul Sasi. Basically, the idea is to install Maldrone by taking advantage of a specific exploit, such as the SkyJack we mentioned a while ago. Maldrone installs silently on the drone, and once integrated, it behaves like a backdoor, but that’s not the most disturbing part. Maldrone is persistent against resets, meaning the only way to remove it is to reinstall all the drone’s software from scratch. The attacker can take control of the drone, activate its camera, obtain sensor readings, and of course, interrupt its operation to make it fall from the sky like a brick.
Sasi’s next step is to create a more generic variant that not only affects the Parrot AR (which he considers a toy) but also other drones with vulnerabilities. I said it in the SkyJack article, and I’ll say it again here: Parrot needs to redouble its efforts in securing its products. In essence, most drones are computers with a quadcopter body, and they suffer from great sensitivity to external attacks.
