Drones are awesome, malware is beautiful and hacking is something which will always be possible. In this article, I am going to explain the possibilities of malware, drones and hacking.
There are various types of malware. Some will focus on stealing information and some will focus on controlling the victim device. Each type of malware is beautiful. The reason is very simple, someone was insane enough to write a piece of code which will get our attention.
Do not get me wrong. It is fucked up if you get infected with malware, but if you are able to design and code malware, then you are performing art.
Hacking drones
The developer Samy Kamkar has crafted a piece of code which is capable of hijacking Parrot AR 2 drones. The code is written and run in PERL and it can be installed on any type of Linux operating system.
Samy Kamkar has titled his piece of code “SkyJack”. The “SkyJack” software will run while the host (drone) is flying around. Once the drone finds a vulnerable Parrot AR 2 drone, it will send WiFi signals to the Parrot AR 2 drone. The signals will hold commands which will allow the operator of SkyJack to control the hijacked Parrot AR 2 drones.
The proof of concept which has been crafted by Samy Kamkar is very straight forward. You will need an Raspberry PI, USB battery, WiFi adapter and a strong “drone” or “helicopter” which will carry the mentioned items.
Now just imagine if you take the SkyJack code and adjust it in such type of way that it will also attack WiFi Access Points, Smartphones and other devices which make use of the WiFi protocol.
Get the Malware to the Choppa!
Now that we have an idea of how it is possible to use drones to infect devices, we are are able to extend the proof of concept with our own ideas.
We could add a second drone to the proof of concept. The second drone will operate as the server (command and control) environment. This will provide us two drones.
The attack drone
The attack drone will search the environment for vulnerable devices, once it finds a vulnerable device it will connect to the server drone. The server drone will provide the right library and tools to the attack drone.
This will allow the attack drone to perform fast attacks and it will preserve battery.
The server drone
The server drone will carry the data and the files which will be used by the attack drone.
Tools used
Samy Kamkar has used various tools in his proof of concept. He used aircrack-ng, node-ar-drone, node.js and SkyJack.
The aircrack-ng tool will perform WiFi cracking attacks on selected targets. If the aircrack-ng is successful the attacker will gain the password to access the selected WiFi environment.
SkyJack holds the codes which will allow the operator to identify Parrot Company devicies and products. The SkyJack tool uses the mac addresses which are crafted by the Parrot Company.
Samy Kamkar explains that the weight which an Parrot drone can carry is around 400 gram. This is awesome, as the Raspberry PI B+ device weights 45 gram.
The Raspbery PI B+ device uses 3 W of power and it uses the SD (SDHC) slot as storage. So if you have a SDHC card which can hold 16 / 32 / 64 GB, then to not hesitate to use it for the Raspberry PI.
You are able to install operating systems on the Raspberry PI. This will allow you to perform the following attacks via the Raspberry PI device:
- Phishing
- Spear Phishing
- WiFi attacks
- Brute Force attacks
- DDoS attacks
- Malware distribution
Now there are some smart guys in the world that believe that it is possible to control “flying devices”. Julian Oliver has created a project which is titled “Cyborg Unplug”. The “Cyborg Unplug” project has been crafted to block Google Glasses, Drones and Hidden Camera’s.
The method which is used in the Cyborg Unplug project is very fair. The Glasshole (Cyborg Unplug) code monitors the environment for known espionage/drone devices and it will block them. The GlassHole project is able to block the devices as it will take a look at the mac addresses. Once it identifies a specific “black-list” mac address it will simply “block” the connection.
