A smile and a giggle I write this blog for week 5 in Current Trends in Cybersecurity and the topic is, drum roll...drones. The reason for the smile and slight snort giggle, yes, I admitted it, is that I bought my husband a drone for Christmas. It has been hilarious and quiet comical if I can say. I believe three times now he has, without a word to me, started his truck and took off to chase after his drone because it went MIA. I am surprised it doesn’t have a name yet. Luckily I had him put a label on the thing with the address and phone number of the owner, since this sucker is much like our beloved pets. Except they don't take off buzzing down the street and end up in a cactus...cough, yeah that happened, cough.
Anyways I got slightly carried away. But seriously, I wish I had video.
Besides the ongoings in my house with regards “the drone”, there is an increased popularity of drones and drone presents in not only military, but civilian space. With that I began to wonder about security, specifically cyber security, with these little things. And there is some interesting information out there on this. I mean we are taking current trends in cybersecurity, so this really is top of that spectrum, I think.
Are these the humans we are looking for?
Apparently a large risk here is that a hacker/attacker could fly a drone into a corporate office building area and start to collect data or a drone could be used to attack WiFi and intercept communication data, use bluetooth channels for data collection, etc. the list goes on and on. These possibilities might be endless and frankly, scary. I see Amazon testing drone delivery and hey that seems kinda cool. Maybe for remote locations or something. Even pizza delivery might sound good as a backup plan for short staff store or with employees calling in sick. But to hack organizations...yeah, it was only a matter of time.
While drones are fun and in the right hands can do some cool things, in the wrong hands we have another avenue of cyber warfare. Now not all drones are capable of being used so maliciously, there are also different types of drones. I know this part because the hubby now wants another one that has a GPS home device AND since the “little one” has gone missing three time that GPS sounds like a good idea. However, that could also be dangerous in the wrong hands. What about strapping a bomb to a drone, GPS program it and bye bye birdie. I mean that seems more like a military drone, but couldn’t a civilian possibly do this? Yikes. So scary and very bad.
Moving Forward
So what do we do? Well cyber security professionals are concerned and realize that most companies and organizations aren’t really prepared for drones. This is something that a corporation needs to realize that they will have to plan for in their threat modeling. Probably not something that would happen a lot right now, but moving forward when drones are even more popular and cheaper, it could be a huge issue. There are a few up and coming 3rd party companies that specialize in getting drones knocked out of the air by using radio waves. Which can be a bonus for corporations that have this concern. I imagine with drone growth we will also see a growth in vendors offering drone protection services as well.
Just another thing that organizations and even us civilians need to consider when technology changes and advances.
Until next time, stay safe out there...oh, and don’t fly your drone and drive. Bad idea
Cartoon retrieved from: http://www.usnews.com/cartoons/president-obamas-drone-policy
Week 5 Blog Post
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