The Department of Homeland Security and US Customs and Border Protection US has told some incidents in which drug cartels illegally hacked their drones to intersect the border between Mexico and the United States. The drones have become popular devices in the US Army but have also started to be used by other authorities, such as police or border patrol.
US Border Patrol Drones Hacked by Drug Cartels
Unlike their counterparts used by the army, worth millions of dollars, uncrewed aerial vehicles that often fly over the US border with Mexico are much smaller due to limited budgets allocated for purchase. Each drone has a GPS receiver that receives data from satellites and navigates along the border to monitor possible illegal crossings. US customs authorities were forced to withdraw the drones to be vulnerable to attacks by spoofing GPS. Specifically, GPS Spoofing is a cyber attack in which inaccurate GPS receiver GPS data are sent. Drug traffickers have realized this through various techniques of GPS Spoofing sent to wrong-coordinated drones, who left their patrol areas to target sites indicated by hackers. Once the drone left the area, it had to watch, trying to correct its course but again received coordinates wrong and left the room. This process is repeated continuously until it runs out of fuel and returns to the base, now that leverage smugglers to cross the border and disable blocking of receipt of the drones.
The solution the use of anti-spoofing equipment
The only way to prevent this scenario would be to use hardware-GPS anti-spoofing within the drones themselves. Michael Buscher, CEO of Vanguard Defense Industries, stated that this is a high-cost module and very bulky. Adding this team to a drone would not only be expensive but would also affect the time of flight of the apparatus, which is unwilling to accept the authorities, reports Defense One.
