XPost: sci.military.naval, soc.history.war.misc, alt.economics
XPost: alt.law-enforcement, or.politics

from
https://www.wired.com/story/drone-accessories-weapons-of-war/

Low-Cost Drone Add-Ons From China Let Anyone With a Credit Card Turn
Toys Into Weapons of War
Chinese ecommerce giants including Temu and AliExpress sell drone
accessories like those used by soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Two drones flying in the sky
Photograph: Anna Barclay/Getty Images

Commercial quadcopters have been on the mainstream gadget scene for 15
years, proliferating across industries and among hobbyists. There's a
swanky DJI store on New York City's Fifth Avenue, and you probably have
a neighbor, not to mention a roofer, who owns a drone. So when
researchers at the embedded-device security firm Red Balloon started
seeing surprising quadcopter accessories on Chinese shopping platforms
like Temu and AliExpress, they didn't think much of it at first. As with
any popular gadget type, there's a whole ecosystem of niche, wacky, and
comical add-ons available for drones. But the more Red Balloon CEO Ang
Cui thought about it, the more unsettled he and his colleagues became
about how cheap and easy it would be for anyone to buy seemingly
disparate add-ons that could easily turn a mainstream quadcopter into a
war machine.

The accessories the researchers found include AI drone guidance modules—essentially small mounted cameras that use object recognition to identify humans and road vehicles at long range—and miles-long fiber
optic tethers. Like plugging an ethernet cable directly into your
laptop, miles-long tethers allow drones to fly around a large area
without being vulnerable to disruption by signal jammers. The
researchers recognized them from battlefield footage and other reports
that such tethers—not to mention AI guidance modules—are being used by
both sides in the Russia-Ukraine war to drop explosives or autopilot
crash entire drones themselves into tracked objects without requiring
operator control.

Daily Newsletter
Our biggest stories, handpicked for you each day.

Sign up
By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action
waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy.
The fact that battlefield technology is widely available in the United
States and around the world at low cost augurs a climate in which any actor—from criminal syndicates to paramilitary groups, from disgruntled employees to ostracized teens—can quickly and cheaply gather the needed equipment to remotely go on a destructive and violent rampage.

Featured Video


Your Tesla Is Watching

“The more we looked at this and started to see the big picture, the more
my heart sank, because these are toys that are really amazing at killing people,” Cui tells WIRED. “This tech didn't exist in the commercial
space two years ago, it wasn't in demand from hobbyists, but now
manufacturers are making it for war and it's spilling over.”

The Red Balloon researchers found that long-range quadcopters are
readily available on marketplaces like AliExpress for under $300, with
many priced at around $200 each. And the unit price of a long-range
drone can drop even lower when purchased in bulk. The researchers
noticed sellers who were claiming that they ship 60,000 of the
long-range drones per month. They purchased a 1-mile-long tether from a
seller on AliExpress for about $260 and another that is 7.5 miles long
for about $700. Meanwhile, the researchers also purchased an AI guidance
module from a different AliExpress seller for $325. Cui and his
colleagues also purchased cargo holders that strap to drones and can be
used to transport beer cans or water bottles, but could also be loaded
with mortar bombs. These were $106 each. In the two months since the researchers made the purchases, they say the prices of most of the
products they bought have even dropped slightly.

“This equipment is mainstream, but it does not just cost a few dollars
to make, so I think this stuff is being sold either at or below cost,”
Cui says.


Most Popular
Nearly All Cybertrucks Have Been Recalled Because Tesla Used the Wrong Glue Gear News and Events
Nearly All Cybertrucks Have Been Recalled Because Tesla Used the Wrong Glue
By Aarian Marshall
‘We Don’t Want an AI Demo, We Want Answers’: Federal Workers Grill Trump Appointee During All-Hands
Politics
‘We Don’t Want an AI Demo, We Want Answers’: Federal Workers Grill Trump Appointee During All-Hands
By Zoë Schiffer
Low-Cost Drone Add-Ons From China Let Anyone With a Credit Card Turn
Toys Into Weapons of War
Security
Low-Cost Drone Add-Ons From China Let Anyone With a Credit Card Turn
Toys Into Weapons of War
By Lily Hay Newman
How to Avoid US-Based Digital Services&-and Why You Might Want To
Security
How to Avoid US-Based Digital Services—and Why You Might Want To
By Violet Blue

Advertisement

In December the Kyiv Post reported of the Ukrainian military's own
long-range, tethered drones, that, “currently about 40 percent of the components [are] sourced locally in Ukraine while, because there is
limited domestic microelectronics manufacturing capability, the rest are imported, primarily from China.”

AliExpress parent company Alibaba and Temu did not respond to requests
for comment from WIRED about whether such accessories—which are not inherently weapons themselves—pose any risks or have purchasing
restrictions imposed on them in any markets.

Advertisement

“I don't know a hobbyist that wants to fly a drone miles away with a
tether to drop a water bottle in someone's yard,” says Dave Torres, Red Balloon's head of FPGA security. “I'm a combat veteran, so I'm used to dealing with IEDs and worrying about things that are buried in the
ground. Well, now you have the capability to fly your IED over whoever
you want to attack.”

Red Balloon specializes in embedded device hardware and firmware
analysis, so the researchers were interested to evaluate the processors
and low-level code powering the fiber optic tethers and AI guidance
components. In the tethers, they were surprised to find years-old, but relatively pricey, reprogrammable chips known as “field programmable
gate arrays” or FPGAs (Torres' area of expertise). Inclusion of these
chips was notable, because it suggests that the devices are designed to
be more dynamic and expandable than what a hobbyist would presumably
need. Meanwhile, the guidance modules have largely reliable object
recognition using all the cheapest components possible, including
Chinese-made chips as their main processor.

“When I first saw the AI guidance components, one was advertising that
it could identify a bird at 30 meters away and a horse at a hundred
meters away—but later they actually just changed that to identifying
people and cars,” says Cui. "It's not specific people or specific models
of vehicles, but they're not even dancing around it anymore that those
are the categories of targets this would be used for.”

Counter-drone defense tech is still, relatively, in its infancy around
the world. Even vague sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena can
throw airports, or the state of New Jersey, into chaos. As WIRED
reported in December, the US Department of Homeland Security has been encouraging state and local law enforcement since at least last summer
to assess their ability to respond to weaponized drones. In a memo, DHS
warned that violent extremists in the US have been looking to modify “off-the-shelf” quadcopters to carry weapons, including "explosives, conductive materials, and chemicals."

Red Balloon is based in New York City, and the researchers note that as
they were investigating drone accessories they began to realize that the
few options currently available for stymying malicious drones can't be
used in dense urban areas.

“The things that work at taking them down are machine guns, lasers, and massive jammers—none of which can be used in a city,” Cui says. “This is why Red Balloon has been focusing on developing techniques appropriate
for high-density environments to track and safely defeat these drones
without shooting at them or without jamming.”

Such approaches could involve targeting drones at the protocol and
firmware level to commandeer them and cause them to land. The
researchers point out that the drones' ultra-low-cost development and manufacturing leaves no margin for research and development, testing, or onboard security protections. This represents a vulnerability for
operators but could also be a benefit for defenders seeking to diffuse
violent attacks without collateral damage.

For now, though, the proliferation of accessories to weaponize
mainstream drones is a looming threat with no easy resolution.

“Somebody who designs a plan and puts it into action could do some sophisticated damage for really, really cheap,” Red Ballon's Torres
says. "I wonder if the US military can even get defense contractors to
build these devices for them for the price they're selling online.”


You Might Also Like …
In your inbox: WIRED's most ambitious, future-defining stories

DOGE takeover: Elon Musk’s toxicity could spell disaster for Tesla

Big Story: A crypto crimefighter’s descent into Nigerian prison

I dated multiple AI partners at once. It got real weird

Summer Lab: Explore the future of tech with WIRED


Lily Hay Newman is a senior writer at WIRED focused on information
security, digital privacy, and hacking. She previously worked as a
technology reporter at Slate, and was the staff writer for Future Tense,
a publication and partnership between Slate, the New America Foundation,
and Arizona State University. Her work ... Read more
Senior Writer

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)