Drones Envisioned To Be Able To Remotely Deliver Spyware

Considering how powerful and dangerous some drones are, especially those that can carry and fire missiles, we’re sure militaries around the world have considered the possibility that these drones could be hacked, infected with some kind of spyware, and controlled by an enemy power.

However interestingly enough according to recently leaked documents from the Hacking Team hack, it seems that a Boeing subsidiary called Insitu and the Hacking Team were working on giving drones the ability to deliver spyware remotely instead. This means that potentially militaries could fly drones over closed network systems and deliver their payload if they aren’t able to access it from their end.

According to an email sent by an Insitu engineer, “We see potential in integrating your Wi-Fi hacking capability into an airborne system and would be interested in starting a conversation with one of your engineers to go over, in more depth, the payload capabilities including the detailed size, weight, and power specs of your Galileo System,” with Galileo being the Hacking Team’s spyware software.

The implications of this is huge, although it is unclear how far they’ve progressed with their plan. In the meantime the recent hack of the Hacking Team also revealed that the group knew about a certain Adobe Flash zero-day vulnerability which they were planning on taking advantage of, although with the information being made public, Adobe has since patched the vulnerability.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Computers, Robots
Tags: Drones, Hacking, Security, spyware