Hacking Team and Boeing Created Cyber Attack Drones
Digging into Hacking Team dumps is getting more and more interesting. According to latest emails, malware company constructed a drone capable of initiating cyber attacks on any devices via WiFi networks. In this conversation it is revealed that Hacking Team and Boeing want to create an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) a.k.a Drones, in order to carry out cyber attacks by injecting devices with spyware via WiFi networks.
Boeing subsidiary Insitu got interested in Cyber Weaponized Drones after attending International Defense Exposition Conference (IDEX) in Abu Dhabi earlier this year. After the conference Insitu immediately contacted Hacking Team and after holding a meeting co-founder Marco Valleri presented a concept based on which cyber attacks would be conducted. This concept also includes a Tactical Network Injection (TNI) hardware capable of directly injecting custom code into WiFi networks, thus making launching man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. Such technique would allows drone master to use a network or its devices for any means.
The general idea of Valleri was that when a target makes a connection to public wifi network in restaurant or hotel, the drone starts intercepting traffic injects Hacking Teams spyware, which as you might already know boots in UEFI making it nearly impossible to detect using operating systems.
In April of 2015 an Instu representative wrote to Emad Shehata, Hacking Team’s key account manager a following email, announcing readiness to start developing drones:
“We see potential in integrating your Wi-Fi hacking capability into an airborne system [drone] and would be interested in starting a conversation with one of your engineers [Hacking Team staff] to go over, in more depth, the payload capabilities including the detailed size, weight, and power specs of your Galileo System.”
Since the emails and agreement were in the early stages of development, it is very doubtful that this cyber weaponized drone project has seen the daylight. However the trend of violating privacy and basic human rights seems to be getting more and more attention from governments and private corporations, posing a risk to global piece and security.
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