Researchers release specs for a DIY radio-controlled plane that hacks systems by air
By Ericka Chickowski, Contributing Editor
Dark Reading, 4 August 2011
BLACK HAT USA 2011 — Las Vegas — Yesterday at Black Hat, two security researchers demonstrated how a radio-controlled model airplane outfitted with a computer and 4G connectivity could be used to create a nearly undetectable aerial hacking device that could perpetrate aerial attacks on targets otherwise unreachable by land.
Created completely with off-the-shelf equipment and open-source software — and with a budget of only about $6,100 — the demo plane they brought on stage with them was capable of wireless network sniffing and cracking, cell tower spoofing, cell phone tracking and call interception, data exfiltration, and video surveillance.
Phi Beta Iota: Until integrity in all senses of the word is “root,” society will continue to be vulnerable to all forms of corruption including low-bidder unethical cyber-systems, and high-bidder unethical cyber-attack.
There is a very talented author, journalist, and speaker, Mike Southon, who publishes in the Financial Times. One of his articles, “Perfect Pitch,” 7 March 2009 was instrumental in crafting the below one-page “pitch.” Mike's four web sites:
On Building Resilient Societies to Mitigate the Impact of Disasters
I recently caught up with a colleague at the World Bank and learned that “resilience” is set to be the new “buzz word” in the international development community. I think this is very good news. Yes, discourse does matter. A single word can alter the way we frame problems. They can lead to new conceptual frameworks that inform the design and implementation of development projects and disaster risk reduction strategies.
The term resilience is important because it focuses not on us, the development and disaster community, but rather on local at-risk communities. The terms “vulnerability” and “fragility” were used in past discourse but they focus on the negative and seem to invoke the need for external protection, overlooking the possibility that local coping mechanisms do exist. From the perspective of this top-down approach, international organizations are the rescuers and aid does not arrive until they arrive.
Resilience, in contrast, implies radical self-sufficiency, and self-sufficien-cy suggests a degree of autonomy; self-dependence rather than dependence on an external entity that may or may not arrive, that may or may not be effective, and that may or may not stay the course. In the field of ecology, the term resilience is defined as “the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a perturbation or disturbance by resisting damage and recovering quickly.” There are thus at least two ways for “social ecosystems” to be resilient:
Resist damage by absorbing and dampening the perturbation.
Recover quickly by bouncing back.
So how does a society resist damage from a disaster? As noted in an earlier blog post, “Disaster Theory for Techies“, there is no such thing as a “natural disaster”. There are natural hazards and there are social systems. If social systems are sufficiently resilient to absorb the impact of a natural hazard such as an earthquake, then disaster unfolds. In other words, hazards are exogenous while disasters are the result of endogenous political, economic, social and cultural processes. Indeed, “it is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. In every phase and aspect of a disaster—causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction—the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus.”
D2 is shorthand for the second global economic depression. It started formally in 2008, and despite a short respite over the last two years, it never left. It was only delayed by massive amounts of government intervention. It is now back in force.
D2, given the forces driving it, is going to last a decade or more. Simple prepping might help a little but it's far from what is going to be required given its duration.
This depression will fundamentally reorder the economic, political and social landscape. When it ends, most of the global institutions and markets we see today will mere husks of what they are today.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a $127.5 million plan Thursday to help young black and Hispanic men. The effort includes money from financier George Soros and his philanthropy.
Koko signs: Smart men both, but neither of them has a holistic understanding of system design. In the jungle, connectivity matters. King of the Reflexive Practice Jungle, Dr. Russell Ackoff, would say this is a magnificent example of doing the wrong thing righter. Paying to connect these young men to a broken system makes no sense–funding them to build a new system to displace the broken one–now that is reflexivity. Good intentions, bad design. We have just two questions.
1. Has anyone asked the young men what they want?
2. In the context of a city failing the resilience test and likely to experience near-catastrophic unemployment in the middle class over the next ten years, is there a strategy for resilience?
The U.S. had its AAA credit rating downgraded for the first time by Standard & Poor’s on concern spending cuts agreed on by lawmakers to raise the nation’s borrowing limit won’t be enough to reduce record deficits.
Koko do math: Cut 1.5 trillion over 10 years; continue to borrow $1 trillion a year, net debt INCREASE $8.5 trillion over ten years. Congress and the White House have known the Republic is insolvent since then Comptroller General David Walker briefed them to that effect in 2007.
5.0 out of 5 stars Tough reading, desperately needs charts and graphs and a proper web site,August 4, 2011
I sat down to write a review and realized that the top review is a very good summary, and has a number of comments that provide specific new information and also recommend two other books, so what I have decided to do, as a direct complement to the top review by Richard Cumming, is provide links to the other books mentioned in the comments, and then add some of my own. I strongly recommend all the comments on the review be read.
The book desperately needs social networking graphics and its own web site. Although the author, who sent me the book, has a web site by the book's title, it is focused on video clips and is not an extension of the book. Public intelligence is now at a point where all that needs to be known is large known, but it cannot be aggregated and made sense of for lack of a public intelligence ability to do data mining and data visualization in a very structured continuous manner.
