Many UAVs Vulnerable To Directed-Energy Weapons 153
mask.of.sanity writes "A New Zealand researcher has detailed ways that UAVs can be crashed using cheap tools like Herf guns and GPS jammers, and could even be downed by flying drones with more powerful radio. The attacks (podcast) interfere with the navigation systems used by flying drones and are possible because security was not designed into the architecture of some machines."
Re:Directed energy weapons (Score:5, Informative)
The catch here is that these "directed energy weapons" were cheap trivialities bought off eBay and not military EW apparatus or gigantic celestial furnaces.
Re:Illegal (Score:5, Informative)
There is a lot that would be destroyed with a blast from such a HERF gun. Wifi interfaces and bluetooth devices especially like it. That is why it is usually illegal (and stupid) to use a microwave oven with a damaged containment.
Re:Illegal (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about all UAVs but the U.S. military ones are programmed to fly home if they get confused. Dunno how they find home if they lose GPS but at least they thought about the issue.
Re:Illegal (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about all UAVs but the U.S. military ones are programmed to fly home if they get confused. Dunno how they find home if they lose GPS but at least they thought about the issue.
Inertial Navigation Systems [wikipedia.org]. Not as accurate as GPS, but good enough to at least not land in enemy territory. And hypothetically by the time you got within a few miles of the base, the GPS would be back online.
Re:Also vunerable to bullets (Score:5, Informative)
The Soviet attempt to train anti-tank dogs was...less than successful. The Russians trained their dogs with their own diesel-fueled tanks, which smelled different from German gasoline-fueled tanks. In the field, they discovered that this meant they had trained the dogs to blow up Soviet tanks but not German ones.