Drones are already under high criticism from masses due to their military use. Now, recently a news on CNN has once again started a new debate about drone applications and their impact on common people. Recently, researchers in London have proved their fears of using drones to steal personal information. This is true that the drone technology can be used for hacking purposes. For this purpose, the researchers designed a drone called snoopy which intrudes into the smartphones or the tablets to get personal information. They have shown that this specially designed drone is able to get access into the Wi-Fi settings and gather all personal informations like credit card PIN, passwords, Amazon password, home address of the user and even the bank information.
It can become the crime of the century. It is a big question mark on the privacy of common people. The experiment was to give a demo for this hacking and stealing though. A smartphone or tablet is, now, considered to be unsafe. The test drone is able to get access to 150 smartphones an hour. This experiment was done in London and the findings will be revealed at “Black Hat Cybersecurity Conference Singapore” next week. After that, world will be able to know the capabilities of snoopy drone.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIwXB7bNQCs[/youtube]
This drone, snoopy, actually scans the Wi-Fi enabled smartphones or tablets around and then hacks into their settings. It can also determine the networks previously used by these devices amd their settings. It can get the information about your history of browsing data. It pretends to be the network your phone last time connected and hence gets all the information. Its algorithm is could easily be implemented on any drone. Hence, we see that every dronecan become a spying drone.
Researcher, Glenn Wikinson says, the way the mobile phones uses the wi-fi internet is as if calling out the name of the networks to which they connect to, for example, “railway station wifi are you there? Park free wifi you there?”. Any malicious hacker pretending to be a genuine network can hack the user name and password of a user.
He spent an hour with CNN to demonstrate how does his prototype works and according to ethical hacker, the main purpose is to show how vulnerable are your handheld devices are. These drones are far dangerous than the other hackers as drones are equipped with wings to fly over the heads. However, there is also a positive aspect of this technology for law enforcement agencies. The remedy to snoopy is to keep Wi-Fi shut down while not using and connecting only to secure networks.