Experts believe the Malaysian Airways Boing 777 could have been hacked by a mobile phone
A cyber hijacking can be accomplished by using a mobile phone to send radio signals to an airliner’s flight management system, thereby changing the plane’s speed, altitude and direction.
WORLD’S FIRST CYBER HIJACK: WAS MISSING MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT HACKED WITHY MOBILE PHONE?
Intelligence chiefs fear the missing Malaysian airliner was hijacked by hackers taking over the controls using a mobile phone
Sunday Express
March 16, 2014
British anti-terror expert Dr Sally Leivesley said last night: “It might well be the world’s first cyber hijack.”
Dr Leivesley, a former Home Office scientific adviser, said the hackers could change the plane’s speed, altitude and direction by sending radio signals to its flight management system. It could then be landed or made to crash by remote control. Possible culprits include criminal gangs, terrorists or a foreign power.
The chilling new theory emerged as the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airways Boeing 777 with 239 people on board became the biggest air-sea search in history.
More than a week after Flight MH370 vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, Malaysian police began searching the captain and co-pilot’s homes as it was finally confirmed that the disappearance was a “deliberate act”.
Dr Leivesley, who runs her own company training businesses and governments to counter terrorist attacks, told the Sunday Express she believes a framework of malicious codes, triggered by a mobile phone, would have been able to override the aircraft’s security software.
“There appears to be an element of planning from someone with a very sophisticated systems engineering understanding,” she said.
“This is a very early version of what I would call a smart plane, a fly-by-wire aircraft controlled by electronic signals.
“It is looking more and more likely that the control of some systems was taken over in a deceptive manner, either manually, so someone sitting in a seat overriding the autopilot, or via a remote device turning off or overwhelming the systems.
“A mobile phone could have been used to do so or a USB stick.
“When the plane is air-side, you can insert a set of commands and codes that may initiate, on signal, a set of processes.”
Dr Leivesley said the hacking threat was laid bare late last year at a science conference in China.
She explained: “What we are finding now is that it is possible with a mobile phone to initiate a signal to a preset piece of malicious software, or malware, in the computer that ¬initiates a whole set of instructions.
“It is possible for hackers, be they part of organised crime or with government backgrounds, to get into the main computer network of the plane through the inflight, onboard entertainment system.
“If you have got any connections whatsoever between the computing systems, you can jump across and you can get into the flight critical ¬system.
“To really protect your computer systems, you do not let anything ¬connect with them and you would keep the inflight systems totally in their own loop so nothing whatsoever connects.
“There are now a number of ways, however, in which the gap between those systems and a handheld device like a mobile phone can be overcome.”
Last April, German security consultant Hugo Teso, who is also a commercial pilot, unveiled a way to hijack a plane remotely using a phone.
Addressing the Hack In The Box security summit in Amsterdam, he said he had spent three years dev-eloping a series of malicious codes on a mobile phone app called PlaneSploit that hacked into an aircraft’s security system.
Yesterday Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak said the plane’ disappearance was a deliberate act. Najib gave the firmest indication to date that the cause was down to someone on board, revealing how investigators now believe the Aircraft and Communications Addressing and Reporting System had been dis¬abled, followed by the switching off of the transponder used to communicate with air traffic control.
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