Hackers Can Disable a Sniper Rifle -- Or Change Its Target

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-can-disable-sniper-rifleor-change-target/

By Andy Greenberg
Security
Wired.com
07.29.15

PUT A COMPUTER on a sniper rifle, and it can turn the most amateur shooter 
into a world-class marksman. But add a wireless connection to that 
computer-aided weapon, and you may find that your smart gun suddenly seems 
to have a mind of its own—and a very different idea of the target.

At the Black Hat hacker conference in two weeks, security researchers Runa 
Sandvik and Michael Auger plan to present the results of a year of work 
hacking a pair of $13,000 TrackingPoint self-aiming rifles. The married 
hacker couple have developed a set of techniques that could allow an 
attacker to compromise the rifle via its Wi-Fi connection and exploit 
vulnerabilities in its software. Their tricks can change variables in the 
scope’s calculations that make the rifle inexplicably miss its target, 
permanently disable the scope’s computer, or even prevent the gun from 
firing. In a demonstration for WIRED (shown in the video above), the 
researchers were able to dial in their changes to the scope’s targeting 
system so precisely that they could cause a bullet to hit a bullseye of 
the hacker’s choosing rather than the one chosen by the shooter.

“You can make it lie constantly to the user so they’ll always miss their 
shot,” says Sandvik, a former developer for the anonymity software Tor. Or 
the attacker can just as easily lock out the user or erase the gun’s 
entire file system. “If the scope is bricked, you have a six to seven 
thousand dollar computer you can’t use on top of a rifle that you still 
have to aim yourself.”

[...]

--
Evident.io - Continuous Cloud Security for AWS.
Identify and mitigate risks in 5 minutes or less.
Sign up for a free trial @ https://evident.io/