How a drone can hack your home network just by flying nearby

UAVs can be used to record incredible scenes for the film, spying on thieves from the air, saving the lives of other people, etc. It is wonderful that they provide ample opportunities, however, unfortunately, the use of UAVs also provides various ways to misuse them for malicious purposes.

Since they were used to smuggle to prisons, carry out illegal espionage and surveillance, and drones can also be used to intercept, according to a group of researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design . communications between the computer and the printer .
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This flying robot can circle above a home or office, and in fact pose a greater danger than you can imagine. If you do not monitor your security, personal documents and files that contain information such as passport numbers and addresses may end up in the hands of criminals .



To demonstrate that this threat does exist, the researchers equipped the drone with a smartphone and developed two applications to intercept the printer’s communications from the outside of the building in which it is located.

The first Cybersecurity Patrol application detects printer vulnerabilities, and in fact this application can be used to detect security holes and even eliminate them. And the second application, which is understandably kept secret, impersonating the car. Basically, the drone creates a false access point and claims to be a printer, tricking a computer while sending files to it for printing.

In principle, all you need to perform such attacks is a smartphone , and a drone becomes necessary if you want to trick the computer at long distances (in most cases, with a radius of 26 meters). By flying over a building at a given distance, a simple drone could provide cyber criminals with access to your home or office network.



In addition to the drone, the researchers also showed that you can use an automatic robotic vacuum cleaner with an installed mobile device to search for vulnerable printers.

The goal of this team of researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design is simply to warn the company about the dangers that an innocuous printer can create and to show that it’s easy enough for cyber-criminals to access information using relatively simple methods.

“The main point [of the research] was to develop a mechanism by which, while outside the company, one could try to patrol the perimeter of its network and find open printers,” the expert said. Moreover, according to him, it can be much cheaper.

The study was carried out as part of a cyber security project sponsored by the government of Singapore. It was focused on printers due to the fact that, as determined by all project participants, they are a weak link, because often just overlooked. A large number of wireless printers with an open Wi-Fi connection are sold by default on the market, and many users forget to change this setting, leaving them vulnerable to cyber-criminals.