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Hackers put US drone fleet in danger

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    Will aircraft fall into the wrong hands?

  • Duration 2:38
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Now before the -- congress is sort of the FAA to come up with a new plan to open US airspace to drones.

By the year 2015.

But there is new information this morning that the navigation systems.

-- unmanned drones could be hacked which would allow the wrong people to gain control of that aircraft John Roberts on that story and Atlanta what did you find out John good morning.

The peg could -- more energy bill so far the implications in the -- about thousands of drones flying across the country been all about privacy issues.

But a team of researchers at the University of Texas have recently uncovered a gaping hole in the security of these unmanned aircraft.

In a series of experiments conducted of the last couple of weeks that Fox News had exclusive access to.

The researchers hacked into the GPS system of a small bit sophisticated drone.

The so called spoof for one that mimics real GPS signals -- to complete control of the drowned by sending it false GPS signals making it go wildly off course several times.

The implications of this are that a terrorist group could do the same thing.

And use it to crash -- drawn into a building even another aircraft.

Top Humphries is the lead researcher on the project.

And five and ten years we've got 30000 of these drones and having the national airspace -- having it with -- piloted vehicles.

Each one of these could be a potential missiles to use -- use against us if they have been commandeered by somebody on the ground.

Now military drones have an encrypted GPS system that's difficult hacking into but at the moment in the civilian world there is no protection bill against an attack like this is the government aware of this you have to think they thought about it.

That the government is aware of this in fact just last week Humphries and his team were invited out to the white sands -- arrange.

In New Mexico to show the FAA and the Department of Homeland Security what they could do it's particularly worrisome.

Because in the years to come drones flying in US airspace are going to get bigger and bigger in fact the founder of FedEx -- a fleet of cargo plane size drones to pilot -- -- packages across the country.

We can do this with the small when we could do with a big one and it it just shows that the kind of mentality that we got after 9/11 where we reinforce the cockpit door to prevent people hijacking planes -- we.

Need to ought to opt out mentality as far as the navigation systems for these UAV's.

Now the government is exploring a couple of programs to try to protect GPS systems that called patriot watch and patriot shield.

But they are poorly funded and at the moment really are much more than a PowerPoint presentation.

Experts I talked to say that they're worried.

That DHS brass really isn't going to pay a proper amount of attention to this until something happens -- and it's a growing issue a John Roberts thank.

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