A Business Digitisation survey carried by Kaspersky in the Middle East, Turkiye, and Africa (META) region earlier this year has shown that businesses in the region are afraid of drone spying as 53% of employees, whose opinions were sampled revealed.
However, the report noted that overall, 70% of employees in the META region said their company would benefit from installing drone detection systems to protect the business from spying as corporate spies and hackers use drones to get trade secrets, confidential information, and other sensitive data from corporations and data centers.
“A drone can carry a device for hacking into corporate networks – for instance, a smartphone, a compact computer (e.g., Raspberry Pi), or a signal interceptor (e.g., Wi-Fi Pineapple [1]), and hackers use these devices to access corporate data and disrupt communications. All wireless communication (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, RFID, etc.) is vulnerable to drone attacks,” they argued.
Drones bring cyberespionage to a new level as they can access data channels that a traditional off-site hacker could not obtain. Most often drone spy threat concerns were mentioned by survey respondents in the spheres of IT, manufacturing, and energy. Overall, 70% of employees in the META region said their company would benefit from installing drone detection systems to protect the business from spying.
A counter-drone technology is a system used to detect, classify, and mitigate drones. These systems employ a wide combination of sensors, including radars, radio frequency analysers, cameras, lidars, jammers and other sensors, to track, analyse drone activity.
Commenting, Emad Haffar, Head of Technical Experts at Kaspersky said: “Our research showed that most business representatives understand the dangers of cyberespionage. Getting information on the tactics, techniques and procedures used by cyber spies helps organisations adapt their defenses and develop countermeasures to thwart these tactics effectively.”
He explained that cyberespionage is typically carried out by means of phishing, malware, exploits, and targeted attacks.