Hack The Drone - SANS Cyber Academy UK

Key Takeaways

so today the students have been participating in a hack the drone challenge which encompasses a number of distant different disciplines spanning penetration testing forensics a few defensive aspects as well essentially trying to break into a drone and keep the other teams out of it so one of the key parts of this challenge is not just your ability to break into systems or to forensic ly identify interesting artifact but the ability to work as a team the system imposes a number of constraints about how many people can simultaneously access a resource and it requires them to effectively communicate to solve problems otherwise it disconnects everyone and the Box starts to fight back we were given access to ratify a small single board computer and we had to connect it to a network assign it a number of parameters to like to talk to the computers then break into the device and gain access to a number of piece of information scattered around it which would allow us to control a drum and front the room it's been great working to different people yeah so so you get experiences from different team members from from different teams in different challenges so it's it's always good to recognize each other skills and work out how we can best use those to our advantage so hugely impressive result we've had three teams successfully control the drone for a short period of time and only one hijack in the middle of a flight of course the the winning team about 15 16 minutes ahead of the next fastest team so very neck and neck but just managing to get in there a little quicker and write some scripts to take it over overall we've worked really well together and it's been been impressive just how quickly the team of five quite determined people can break a giant letters we got there first which was nice but no it was it was just good to work together as a team knowing how easy it is to break into a lot of those devices once you know what you're doing is something the manufacturers really need to get a grip on and learn how to sort out today's been it's been putting into practice some of the techniques and tools that we've used now many times during the course of the Academy but it's been especially helpful in working with different people again yeah it's been a good day aside from a fun challenge of hacking into a drone which is always entertaining to us security professionals that there really are a couple of takeaways first it demonstrates the unprecedented power that we're giving cyber criminals in the physical world as we connect more and more technology in our everyday lives and it shows how many of these devices are surprisingly vulnerable compared to traditional computers obviously the students also get a lot of experience in working together in teams effectively communicating and organizing themselves and lastly problem-solving skills it's fantastic to know everything you possibly can about security but if you can't think laterally and identify the right approach to a situation you're not going to get very far