The dangers of drone

People have been using drones to smuggle goods for years. Porn, weapons, drugs—god, so many drugs. The tiny whirring machines have proven discreet little contraband-transport contraptions, but one smuggling operation’s astoundingly successful run just got grounded. All of this has benefited from a new approach to fighting drones. This approach solves the current difficulty of managing drones

From July 2015 through May of this year, a drone gang made at least 49 flights into prisons in England and Scotland, smuggling in weed and mobile phones. But authorities just jailed eight people after cameras set up outside a prison in Worcestershire to capture wildlife caught them in the act, according to the BBC.

The best solution - drone jammer

To catch drones, police and militaries are experimenting with everything from eagles to lasers. Yet in battlefields like northern Iraq, the answer is neither avian capture nor directed light: it’s radio frequencies generated by antennas and pointed at the drones.

According to the brief description provided by Tasnim, the drone jammer can lock onto an enemy drone, and then “disrupt its operation or even hack the aircraft and force it to land safely.” More pictures of the weapon are available at a Tasnim gallery.

While we don’t know more about this particularly anti-drone antenna/rifle yet, we’ve seen other similar designs. The Battelle Memorial Institute built an anti-drone antenna that mounts to a rifle, and called it the “DroneDefender.” A more recent version of that weapon was spotted deployed in Iraq earlier this year. In November, drone jamming company Drone Shield unveiled the DroneGun, a similar antenna-rifle with a backpack power supply. The whole effect looked a little bit Ghostbusters in appearance.

Rather than jamming a drone, the Army Cyber Institute at West Point built an antenna-and-computer rifle that fed information into an open channel of an unlocked Parrot drone. This allowed the cyber rifle to send an override code to the Parrot drone, crashing it, without violating FCC and FAA rules on signal jammer. At a training exercise this Halloween, West Point cadets encountered a drone on a simulated raid, and had to use the cyber-rifle to knock it out of the sky. The consequence, for a team that failed to plan around the drone, was an artillery strike that took out the entire machine gun section of the platoon.