The Department of Homeland Security and US Customs and Border Protection US has told some incidents in which their drones were hacked by drug cartels in order to illegally intersect the border from 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.
Unlike their counterparts used by the army, worth millions of dollars, unmanned aerial vehicles that often fly over the US border with Mexico they are much smaller due to limited budgets that are allocated for purchase.
US customs authorities were forced to withdraw the drones to be vulnerable to attacks by spoofing GPS. Specifically, the GPS Spoofing is a cyber attack in which is a faulty GPS receiver GPS data are sent. Each drone has a GPS receiver that uses to receive data from satellites and navigate along the border in order to monitor possible illegal crossings.
Drug traffickers have realized this and through the use of various techniques of GPS Spoofing sent to a wrong coordinated drones, who left their patrol areas to target sites indicated by hackers.
The solution, the use of anti-spoofing equipment
The only way to prevent this type of scenario would be using hardware-GPS anti-spoofing within the drones themselves.
As stated by Michael Buscher, CEO of Vanguard Defense Industries, this is a high-cost module and also very bulky. Add this team to a drone would not only be expensive but would also affect the time of flight of the apparatus, which are unwilling to accept the authorities, reports Defense One.
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