The use of drones equipped with cyber-spying equipment was previously limited to abstract academic discussions among cybersecurity enthusiasts, but now, drones can be used in the real world to penetrate networks and steal information.
On October 10, cybersecurity researcher Greg Linares published a Twitter thread providing a brief overview of a drone-based cyberattack he had recently witnessed while working as a freelance researcher.
According to Mr. Gohel, the incident began when an unnamed financial company picked up unusual traffic on its network as a result of the hack. In the process of tracing the Wi-Fi signal, the con men discovered two drones on the roof and alongside, they also discovered some other activity on the network.
Linares described one of the drones as being a modified DJI Phantom which carried what he called a "modified Wifi Pineapple device" and the other as being a similarly modified DJI Matrice 600 device which contained "a Raspberry Pi, batteries, GPD mini laptop, a 4G modem, and another Wi-Fi device," he explained.
In addition to the successful cyberattack, Linares explained that the attackers were also able to access devices connected to the Atlassian Confluence site from the internal page. This was done to steal credentials and other information. During the threat hunters' investigation, they discovered that one of the drones had been damaged but was still functional.
"In light of the limited success of this attack, it appears that once the attackers were detected, they crashed the drone as they were recovering it from the ground," Linares claimed on Twitter.
He further explained that a drone attack of this kind would probably not cost more than $15,000 to be put together, although he did not provide an exact figure.
As he explained in his warning, attackers spend this amount of money on internal devices and do not care about destroying them. "This is the third real-world attack I have encountered from a drone in the last two years," he added.
