In December, the Kyiv post on Ukrainian army’s own long-distance, tied drones, that ‘currently about 40 percent of the components [are] locally acquired in Ukraine, because there is a limited manufacturing capacity of domestic microelectronics, the rest is mainly imported from China. “

AliExpress moicing company Alibaba and Temu did not respond to requests for comments from Wired or such accessories – which are not inherent weapons themselves – pose any risks or purchased purchase constraints in any markets.

“I don’t know a hobby that wants to fly a drone mileage away with a tape to drop a water bottle in someone’s garden,” says Dave Torres, Red Balloon’s head of FPGA Security. “I’m a combat veteran, so I’m used to dealing with everyone and worrying about things buried in the ground. Now, now you have the ability to fly you to who you want to attack. ‘

Red Balloon specializes in embedded apparatus hardware and firmware analysis, and the researchers were interested in evaluating the processors and a low-level code that awakening the fiber optic tethers and AI guidance components. In the Tethers, they were surprised to find years-old, but relatively expensive, reprogrammable chips, known as’ field programmable gatekikings’ or FPGAs (Torres’ Erffary). The inclusion of these chips was striking because it indicates that the devices are designed to be more dynamic and expandable than a hobby would probably need. Meanwhile, the accompaniment modules largely reliable object recognition using all the cheapest components, including Chinese manufactured chips as their main processor.

“When I first saw the AI ​​guidance components, one advertised that it could identify a bird at 30 meters away and a horse on a hundred meters – but later they just changed it to identify people and cars,” Cui says. “These are not specific people or specific models of vehicles, but they no longer dance to being the categories of targets for which it would be used.”

Counter-Drone Defense Tech is still relative in its infancy around the world. Even vague observations of unidentified air phenomena can throw airports, or state New Jersey, into chaos. As Wired reported in December, the US Department of Home Security has encouraged the state and local law enforcement since last summer to judge their ability to respond to weapons stones. In a memo, DHS warned that violent extremists in the US were looking to change ‘out-of-the-shelter’ four buyers to carry weapons, including ‘explosives, conductive materials and chemicals’.

Red Balloon is based in New York, and the researchers notice that, when they investigated drone accessories, they are beginning to realize that the few options currently available to stimize malicious drones cannot be used in dense urban areas.

“The things that work to take it off are machine guns, lasers and massive jammers – of which no one can be used in a city,” Cui says. “That’s why Red Balloon focused on developing techniques suitable for high -density environments to detect and defeat these drones safely without shooting at them or without getting stuck.”

Such approaches may involve targeting drones at the protocol and firmware level to offer and land it. The researchers point out that the Drones’ ultra-low-cost development and manufacturing leave no margin for research and development, testing or on board security protection. It is a vulnerability to operators, but it can also be an advantage for defenders who want to spread violent attacks without collateral damage.

But for the time being, the spread of accessories to weapon mainstream -drones is a threatening threat with no easy resolution.

“Someone who designs a plan and puts it into effect can do sophisticated damage for really, very cheap,” says Torres of Red Ballon. “I wonder if the US Army can even get defense contractors to build these devices for them for the price they sell online.”