American hacker told how to intercept control of aircraft

During interrogation at the FBI, a former employee of an American IT company said that he allegedly hacked passwords of on-board computers and participated in the management of the aircraft, forcing the liner to climb and deviate from the route.

Former IT security specialist at the American company One World Labs, Chris Roberts, said that he hacked into the internal network of an aircraft, rewrote the passwords of the airliner’s security system, and even participated in the control of the aircraft, he reports in his report. article wired.

During interrogation at the FBI, he confessed that he even managed to force one of the planes to gain altitude and deviate from the intended route. "He stated that he was able to give a command to one of the engines, which led to a set of speeds, and the plane began to go to the sides, strayed from the route," says a warrant signed by FBI agent Mark Hurley, who conducted the interrogation. The full text of the order was posted online.

Roberts was withdrawn from a Chicago-Syracuse flight due to a suspicious Twitter message. Intelligence agencies are interested in the publication, in which the hacker reported that he could crack the internal network on board. After Roberts was removed from the flight, he explained to the FBI agents and the Italian security officers for a few hours that it was just a joke.

Later it became known that the hacker periodically broke the law and played such dangerous games with real passenger planes for three years in the period from 2011 to 2014 a year. For this, he needed only a laptop, flash drives, special wires to connect and the knowledge that he gained over many years of working with security systems. These devices were confiscated from him during interrogation in Italy.

As the Engadget publication notes, in order to prepare a charge against a hacker, the FBI has yet to overcome the resistance of aircraft designers: the latter, for obvious reasons, insist on the absolute safety and security of all electronic systems on board the aircraft.

“How ironic: to prepare a charge against Chris Roberts, the FBI will have to seriously undermine the credibility of the aviation industry,” the publication quotes the reaction of one of the IT experts to this story.

However, earlier experts of the US Audit Chamber have already stated that modern civil aviation aircraft have become very vulnerable to hacker attacks. This is stated in the report on the analysis of the work of the United States Federal Aviation Administration, which is preparing to switch to a new generation air traffic control system - NextGen.

And experts have repeatedly stated that they fear the possible hacking of the control system of the aircraft via Wi-Fi. On the one hand, access to wireless Internet is necessary for greater passenger comfort, but on the other hand, it makes liners attractive prey for hackers.