Watch: This Very Popular Drone Get Hacked Mid-Flight by A Hacker
3rd May 2017: This video was recently uploaded on the Forbes website. It shows the ease with which a popular drone, gets hacked right out of the sky. Similar models with similar design seem to be affected by the same vulnerability used by the researchers.
Researchers and students at the University of Texas at Dallas just hacked a drone manufactured by DBPOWER. The DBPOWER Quadcopter is a commercial drone, currently available on Amazon. The DBPOWER quadcopter is one of the most popular drones on Amazon and other shopping websites. The drone is originally priced at an attractive cost of 140$.
The drone promises excellent features like an HD camera for all your image capturing needs. Apart from that, the quadcopter also boasts a VR headset compatibility which is a first of its kind at such an attractive price tag.
But the video uploaded by the researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas shows how easy it is to gain root access to the drone's firmware. The security of the device can be easily compromised. This vulnerability allows any hacker to hack your drone mid-flight and gain total control over it.
Once the hacker has used the vulnerability, your mobile app that is used to control the quadcopter will completely lose control of the drone, and it will end up falling straight to the ground mid-flight.
But the real threat to privacy arises when you realize that the camera and the data storage of the drone can also be hacked. This allows the hackers to steal private information, photos, videos and all kinds of important and private data.
Although the manufacturer was notified about the breach back in February, there is still no step taken from the manufacturer's side to prevent any such thing from happening again. As of now, there is no fix for this vulnerability.