Researcher commandeers drone through Maldrone backdoor

If having drones buzzing around delivering Amazon packages and crashing onto the White House lawn isn't troubling enough, a Citrix security engineer in India has demonstrated how to hack into one of the flying devices and infect it with malware, appropriately called Maldrone.

Noting that he had to be near the Parrot AR drone to install the malware, once Rahul Sasi gained control, he issued a “kill command.” He said he could have executed other actions, including commandeering the drone to do remote surveillance.

The engineer set out to build a generic backdoor, finding that “the best bet is to interact with the sensors and navigation data directly,” he said in a video demo. 

Maldrone is a payload malware that can be installed as a backdoor “once you hack a drone using skyjack or any drone specific vulnerability,” Sasi said.