I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . Chapters 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Each also has a case study. Here is the excerpts from case study, for Chapter 13 which focused on being Paranoid about security and other threats. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.
In late July 2011, Mike Tassey and Rich Perkins drove over 1,700 miles from their homes in the Midwest to Las Vegas, NV. The drive was mostly uneventful. There were hundreds of miles of flat farmland at the front end and hundreds of miles of desert at the other end. The big excitement was a crack in the car’s windshield, thanks to a mud-covered pickup truck dropping baseball size chunks of mud, rocks, and gunk onto the highway in front of them.
They were carrying some yellow cargo that could have brought law enforcement scrutiny. No, there was nothing explosive. If the law had run a background check, it would have soon found both Tassey and Perkins had fairly high-level security clearances. Both have worked for the U.S. Air Force and other federal agencies.
The cargo was definitely explosive, but in a different sense. Tassey and Perkins were carrying an FMQ-117B U.S. Army target drone to the Black Hat/DefCon conference in Las Vegas.
The 14-pound, 67-inch wingspan drone is by itself dated technology. It was first shipped in 1979 for surface-to-air defense training. The 2 x 6 cell 22.2v 5000 mAh LiPo batteries allow it to fly for less than an hour at a time, compared to the drones that go across the world in today’s battles.
It was the payload and capabilities that impressed the tough-to-impress security audience the conference attracts each year. (The audience is by definition paranoid. Many pay cash for the conference and register under assumed names.)
**********************
Says Tassey:
What we call our Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform is a proof-of-concept UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) designed to demonstrate the ability of a relative layman to utilize off-the-shelf and open-source components to craft an autonomous platform from which to launch attacks against wireless clients, networks and cellular phones on the ground.
We made several modifications, but did not use any custom manufactured parts. As an example, we modified the airframe to utilize the electric motor to quiet the UAV so that we could operate nearly silently. We added an off-airframe processing capability that can reside anywhere on the Internet. This capability makes use of the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), which allows the use of NVidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) present on inexpensive video cards to process mathematical data at incredible speeds.
Most of the hardware and software is easily available online. The average enthusiast can build and operate this. The whole package cost us only around $6,000 to put together.
Says Perkins:
The thrust of the concept was that organizations spend large amounts of money on physical security (locks, doors, fences, guards, etc.), which is focused on the “bad guy” being a person with a backpack, a car in the parking lot, or an imposter with a laptop. The more we looked at the state of security the more it became obvious that no one is looking up at the skies.
No one is looking up because, until recently, the technology and the skills needed to create a viable unmanned cyber-attack drone were out of the reach of anyone not affiliated with the government or part of a specialized group of researchers at a university.
********************************
Tassey says over the course of the project that “We have found that there are quite a few groups doing UAV research for imagery and radio projects from around the world.”
Whether their device is used positively or negatively, they deserve credit for raising the level of paranoia around tech security.
Summarizes Perkins:
“We want people to stop thinking that they can be complacent and make assumptions about security, because the bad guys aren’t complacent at all. They are creative, intelligent, and always take the path of least resistance. It is truly a case of ‘If we can do it . . . so can they.’”
Photo Credit: Perkins and Tassey
Comments