December, Kyiv Post Report Among the Ukrainian military’s own long-range bondage drone, “there are currently about 40% of the components [are] Local procurement in Ukraine, because of the limited domestic microelectronic manufacturing capacity, the rest are mainly imported from China. ”
Aliexpress parent companies Alibaba and Temu did not respond to requests for Onired’s comments about whether such accessories (not the inherent weapon itself) would impose any risks or purchase restrictions imposed on them in any market.
“I don’t know a fan who wants to throw a water bottle tied to someone’s yard a mile away,” said Dave Torres, head of FPGA security at Red Balloon. “I’m a combat veteran, so I’m used to dealing with IEDs and worrying about something buried on the ground. Well, now you have the ability to fly the IEDs over anyone who wants to attack.”
Red Balloon specializes in embedded device hardware and firmware analysis, so researchers are interested in evaluating processors and low-level code to power fiber composition and AI-guided components. In Tethers, they were surprised to find years-old but relatively expensive reprogrammable chips called “field programmable gate arrays” or FPGAs (a area of expertise in Torres). Including these chips is worth noting, as it shows that these devices are designed to be more dynamic and scalable than amateurs may need. Meanwhile, using all the cheapest components, including chips made in China as the primary processor, the guidance module has largely reliable object recognition.
“When I first saw the AI guidance component, people were advertising that it could recognize a bird within a distance of 30 meters and a horse was a hundred meters away, but then they actually just changed it to identify people and cars,” CUI said. “It’s not a specific person or a specific vehicle model, but they don’t even dance around it anymore because these are the categories of targets.”
Anti-UAV defense technology is still in its infancy worldwide. Even vague sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena can be abandoned Airportor New Jerseybecomes chaos. As Link report in DecemberSince last summer, the Department of Homeland Security has been encouraging state and local law enforcement to assess their ability to respond to weapons drones. In the memorandum, the Department of Homeland Security warned that violent extremists in the United States have been seeking to modify “off-the-shelf” people carrying weapons, including “dynamite, conductive materials and chemicals.”
Red Balloon, based in New York City, noted that when they investigated drone accessories, they began to realize that several options available to block malicious drones are not available in dense urban areas.
“The job that lowers them is machine guns, lasers and large jamners, which are impossible to use in cities,” Cui said. “That’s why the red balloons have been focusing on developing technologies suitable for high-density environments to safely defeat these drones without firing at them or being accessible.”
This approach may involve drones targeting protocol and firmware levels to direct them and cause them to land. Researchers point out that there is no room for ultra-low cost development of drones and R&D, testing or airborne safety protection in manufacturing. This represents operator vulnerability, but may also be a benefit for defenders seeking to spread violent attacks without collateral damage.
But for now, the proliferation of accessories for weaponized mainstream drones is an imminent threat and there is no simple solution.
“A person who designs a plan and puts it into practice can cause some complex damage really cheaply,” said Torres of Red Ballon. “I wonder if the U.S. military can even build these devices for the price they sell online.”
