How Terrorists Are Turning Robots Into Weapons

Terrorists and college kids already have hacked into government drones. It's time to rethink security with the rise of robotics. 
Their missions varied from intelligence collection to “kinetic operations against high value targets” such as launching Hellfire missiles against insurgents.  The drone pilots remotely carrying out these operations seven thousand miles away in the Nevada desert intently watched live video feeds of their targets as they navigated their UAVs in pursuit of their quarry. As it turns out, they weren’t the only ones watching.
Shia militants had figured out a way to hack the American flying robotic fleet and capture its live video feeds. Using a $26 piece of Russian hacker software known as SkyGrabber, commonly sold in the digital underground to steal satellite television signals, the insurgents were able to intercept the video footage emanating from the classified Predator drones. Thus as the Americans were watching the insurgents, the insurgents were watching back, providing them with a tactical advantage and vital intelligence on coalition targets. If the militants saw their house coming into close video focus, they knew it was definitely time to rapidly consider alternative housing options.
The students carried out their attack by successfully spoofing the drone’s GPS and changing its coordinates, all using hardware and software they had built at school for under $1,000. 
Unsurprisingly, others have taken notice, including the Iranians, who successfully used the same technique to jam the communication links of an American RQ-170 Sentinel drone overflying their country, forcing it into autopilot mode. The drone followed its programming and returned to base in Afghanistan, or so it thought. In reality, the Iranians had successfully spoofed the UAV’s GPS signals, flying the robotic soldier right into the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The capture of the drone and its classified technology was a significant intelligence coup for the Iranians and provided yet further evidence that the day of robo-hacking has arrived.
But in this day and age, we not only have to worry about drones themselves 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. 
Importantly, the rise of the criminal UAV is also completely incompatible with our current security paradigms. Prisons use tall, sharp, often electric fences to isolate criminals for reasons of public safety, a system that worked relatively well for hundreds of years. But our security and defense mechanisms were meant to protect us from offending human criminals, not robotic ones. 
It’s time to rethink that since drones can circumvent not only prison fences but, any fence, including those protecting your backyard, office building, or even national borders. In other words, the cyber threat is morphing from a purely virtual problem into a physical world danger.
DefenseOne: http://bit.ly/1JbRdQg