Infamous Hacker Creates SkyJack To Hunt, Hack, And Control Other Drones

The gray sky darkens as the sun dips below the horizon. The hum of a thousand drones replace the quiet of sunset, charging through the city behind a single leader drone. Children tug on the hands of their parents, pointing at the aerial army with concern.

“How did this happen?” one man asks another.

“Amazon,” answers the second man. “And Samy Kamkar.”

That name might not mean much to you unless you’re a hacker, but Kamkar is the serial hacker responsible for the Myspace-crumbling Samy worm, which hit the social networking site in 2005 and later landed Kamkar in jail.

Now, he has released all the necessary hardware and software specs to create a drone-hacking drone. In other words, anyone can now create an aerial drone that will be able to hunt down other drones, hack into them, and control them.

Kamkar is calling the hack “SkyJack” and it requires a Raspberry Pi circuit board, as well as a Parrot AR.Drone quadcopter. You’ll also need a small battery and two wireless transmitters. There will also reportedly be a version of SkyJack that runs on grounded Linux machines to hack drones within radio range.

If you want to get into the nitty gritty details, head on over to Kamkar’s blog post on the matter, or take a look at the video embedded.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHKV01YQX_w&w=640&h=480]

[via ArsTechnica]