Annoying drones invading your private property?
By Dominic Alvieri
December 25th, 2024
Hacking is Illegal and for Nerds
Stopping a common drone is easier than you think.
Hacking drones is not new. We're not firing up Kali and taking over a drone for an offensive campaign but merely expressing the defensive capabilities available to take down an illegal drone illegally invading your private property. You will be surprised by how easy it actually is.
I have always believed that anything that communicates from a point to another point can be intercepted or hacked. Drones are no different. It's been a few years since I have compromised a drone so this refresher was inspired from the recent panic of drone sightings in New Jersey.
In simplest terms most drones need to use Wi-Fi to communicate with and receive commands from the operator via the controller...so don't forget to log the MAC addresses.
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| nist.gov |
Defensive Techniques
The basic ways to defend against a drone offensive is to take control of the drone, shoot down, destroy or otherwise capture and stop the drone physically, disable drone communications and force a "Go Home" landing or otherwise disable the drone itself to force a landing.
Check the laws in your state or country
Drones over about a half of a pound must be registered in the United States and generally must be flown lower than 400 feet and controlled within your eye sight.
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| FAA |
Dependency Confusion, if you will
Since most people don't have access to a high powered device to emit an electromagnetic pulse and wouldn't want to risk shooting a drone down most lean towards another path.
I like to call it creating a dependency confusion. Dependency confusion can have multiple definitions and also be known as a substitution attack which is an attack path that creates and registers malicious packages publicly to mimic and fool users of privately coded packages. This is also called namespacing.
Roughly speaking most spoofings are also a form of dependency confusion. You would fool a device or service to connect to and receive commands form an apparent authorized device which you control.
GPS Frequencies
Detecting a drone using radio frequency sensors is quite easy if you were so inclined. By detecting the exact frequency you can obtain the serial number and MAC address of the drone and target it directly but you shouldn't have to get that granular. You would start with a radio frequency jammer.
Generally speaking certain frequency bands will have more common household devices using it so this method will create unintended interference so check your local laws.
Drone frequency bands vary and include 433 and 915 MHz, 1.2 & 1.3GHz, 2.4 GHz and 5.8GHz.
Radio Frequency Analysers, Spoofers and Jammers
The goal is this simple hack to mask the signal between the drone and the controller and either force it into "Go Home" mode and either go to the pre programmed home location and fly away or land or crash where it currently is.
Once again drones that use Wi-Fi communicate between the onboard unit and the controller and can have advanced RF Analysers detect their communication and even their MAC addresses but they are not commercially available. RF Spoofers and difficult to find and legally in the gray area.
The simplest way is to jam the signal and confuse the drone. If that fails we can always open up Kali and get more granular in detail for another attack. Certain details have been left out for safety.
Stay safe, online and off.
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