- A Department of Homeland Security official admitted that the agency was able to remotely hack into a Boeing 757 during a test in 2016.
- The DHS official indicated that he and his team were able to do so without having any direct contact with the aircraft or using any materials that would be flagged by security.
- While the exact details of the hack are confidential, Boeing insists that the hackers were not able to take control of the aircraft's flight systems.
The Department of Homeland Security illustrated that fact when it remotely hacked into a Boeing 757 through its radio communication system at an airport in Atlantic City, NJ, according to CSO . While the hack occurred in September 2016, it wasn't revealed until DHS official Robert Hickey gave his keynote address at an aerospace security summit on Nov. 8.
Though the exact details of how he and his team managed to hack into the plane are classified, Hickey indicated that no one on his team was in physical contact with the aircraft or used any materials that would be flagged by security. Boeing insists that the hack was limited to the aircraft's communication system and did not reach any of the controls or software that could alter its flight path.
" We witnessed the test and can say unequivocally that there was no hack of the airplane's flight control systems," the company told the Daily Beast .
Still, this is alarming news for the aviation industry. The Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration have been aggressive in trying to prevent passengers from boarding aircraft with items that could put other passengers at risk, but if it becomes possible to control a plane's communication and flight capabilities from the ground, their existing security infrastructure may need a significant update.
Reader Comments
Any computer with networking systems CAN be HACKED. Just because they made it hard does not change the fact of this.
Boeing and Airbus have a near complete reliance on computers to do the work of flying a plane, All the things that make a fly-by-wire aircraft work so good also make it vulnerable to access by actors willing to do harm, be they Boeing, Searco, Airbus,McDonnell Douglas....the list is huge... If you have the inside Intel on these systems you can make them do WHATEVER YOU WANT
Same as a car with fly-by-wire controls... You don't have ultimate control, The COMPUTER does. Most cases this is a good thing, But Michel Hastings is not here to make the claim so i will, Mercedes Benz Hacked his auto and used there controls to operate his car in very dangerous ways..... FOUR flights were under the same conditions as his car on that day, September 11 th and WE KNOW IT.
If you have all the code and access coding to do the work, You are going to have to PROVE you had nothing to do with it, without this proof we find you guilty. We boycott your aircraft and cars, Bugger them, they are untrustworthy.
I feel sorry for the humans going for this ride, but someone has to fear this before it's brought into very bright lights, all i can say is....
"Sucks to be You!"
Same thing for Mercedes Benz.
Same thing for Ford, Tesla and any others giving computers control of things that can kill.
Fix your shit NOW!
We are watching VERY closely!
NASA proved the concept of remotely controlled airliners way back in 1984 using a modified Boeing 720 4 engine jet.
The idea was to improve suitability and test anti-misting agents added to the fuel, So the claims go.
Did they get anywhere doing this test for these reasons? Not really, subsequent accidents don't show too much of an improvement, as is expected with a jet full of tons and tons of kerosene, So why do it at all? The entire test was rigged with these huge formations and jagged steel beams to rip open the aircraft why would they do this?
Everyone saw this clip in the years following, they saw the huge fireball, everyone recalls the conflagration, I doubt the idea was to promote fire is bad.
Why is it they went to considerable trouble to do this testing? Why is it that you are privy to about 1:20 of this many months of testing?
Could it be your attention span? Could it be perhaps they did not want to have too many questions about the WAY this aircraft was crashed, how they covered up the many hours of testing of the remote control system they were after using a huge fireball and a few hundred meters of slow motion films of the dummy Holocaust™???
Not too many persons that saw this event in the micro treatment world of "If it burns you never forget" will know that this aircraft made a bunch of test landings and flew around for hours on end all without a human on board.... Keeping that under cover of fire is the intent.
Your seeing the END in FIRE short circuits your understanding of the whole, Blinds you to the tricks of pulling off this fire, blind to the trickery in it's meaning and it usefulness.
Fly-by-wire is one of the many black holes in understanding that can be traced to this event, The piece of crap "flying bedstead" that almost killed the would be astronaut Armstrong was the start, Us Canadians used it to control the CF-105, but the idea was not really a thing until Concorde.
Fly-by-wire is so common now the idea of a large aircraft not using it is dead. Every single system that is run by computers is bound by those computers to do as they say it should, It uses sensors and pitot tubes to sense the important things of the aircraft and it's response and then the pilot 'Suggests' to the computer what he would like the bird to do and the computer figures out how to move the controls to keep the pilot quiet and to stop annoying it.
Now the rub is when you add a whole host of gear to this system. Autopilot systems have been a part of aviation for a very long time, before the Boeing 777 these systems were not too bright, But after they had the ability to fly the aircraft from point a on the departure ramp to point z at the arrival runway without human intervention. the takeoff,flight,weather,approach,landing and breaking all can be done with computer control alone.
If the computer is in control of all the systems flying a plane then the control of that system of computers is very important, [Link]
If you have the coding and the access to these computers you can become the pilot, even if the human on board does not want that, If you have the computer on the aircraft you can make it do as you please.... even crash it into very tall structures, or even into another aircraft if you so choose.
The men that program the code these systems work are now sitting on a huge pile of dangerous info if their work gets out, A Zero day for any Boeing airliner is going to cost them HUGE to have it concealed, You will NEVER EVER hear of this trade, Boeing has to pay for every secret that gets out. Those NDA's are serious and lucrative. Every single system is going to have weakness that will be useful, To most this usefulness is in selling the info to the system's owner, but once you own the owner, the piper calls the tune. Pull some shit, cover your tracks,deny everything. A very CIA modus operandi.
Since September 11th the systems added only enhance the attack surface of these systems. If you go and buy a ticket to fly on one of these systems you accept that they might just get you burnt. Going into an airport and hoping the beat is a path many many walk every day, Those that made that walk on 9/11 did not fathom the end they saw. I doubt any of them hit the tower, i very much doubt they hit the Pentagon, and every indication is they interfered in some catastrophic way in Shanksville.
Mr Hastings felt the terror of loss of control, as did the driver of the Princess's limo. Question is are you smart enough to end this sort of threat?
A threat by the way only gets worse by the day as systems proliferate. What will you do?
Seeing as i am flammable and i cannot fly without an airplane to do so i stay the hell out of the airport, I had them tow away the stupid Mercedes Benz powered smart car.
I now see the danger clearly because i pissed off forces that had ultimate control of my car, so they were ended, as a matter of self defense, I canceled that control, Parked the system and moved on to safer transportation.
You can too, If you think and learn about that control and it implications. You don't get two chances to kill me with a spook rigged car.
Certainly they would, the lawyers demand such things.
Do you think the Boeing company would make remote control harder or easier with such interventions?
More to mess with is easier to control, and seeing as those interventions are on the path of control of the aircraft beyond a hijackers access while he is in the aircraft right in the cockpit.
Do you think that Boeing installed a system like this after 9/11 or do you think they already had said controls well before this point in our timeline?
Changes to a certified system are not as easy as one would think, The hush hush on these sorts of topics not withstanding, i think word would have leaked out about any such changes so Boeing was well and truly in the anti hijacker camp long ago, [Link] did not go unnoticed by the legal department of Boeing i can assure you. 1977 folks, a long time to work out a fix. Thus the Boeing Uninterruptible autopilot was born. Everyone goes nighty nite and the bird finds a cat.III b airport and lands and the feds work out the details.
In other words a system to terminate a hijacked flight without the aircraft being lost. Lawyers love this stuff.
Not all cars can be controlled remotely, the target system has to have the ability like in my case, the Benz powered car i had was limited to 49 Hp and 79 ft/lbs torque, so even with throttle control of that, they are not going to have too much effect using such small power, But if you are moving at 100 km/h in a fast lane on a known dangerous road and they want to freak you out they might shut off your fuel pump and see how you do in traffic without any power, Then your having to doge several large trucks whilst you navigate to the side of the road, then that sort of control is easy, if you flip out about the whole issue of your car constantly having this sort of failure and annoy some rich assed Mercedes Benz manager, you might have an Airbag go off 48 seconds after leaving the dealership... that sort of control is very real, i have the photos of the bruise i received to show. Talked with transport Canada all about it. But you can't prove shit about it.
A car like Hastings 240 has a very capable engine, has controls for stability control that include steering and braking controls, with the higher level systems you get higher levels of controls to keep it safe/dangerous depending who has the control.
Ford uses many of these sorts of controls that can override the driver in an accident just as Mercedes Benz uses. Tesla has a autopilot system.... all use controls that can be accessed if you have the requisite coding to do it...all have the interface systems required to port this coding to the ECU's doing the work. Big HP cars have lots of things reining in control of the power so as to limit liability of the manufacturer, not to keep you as a stupid driver safe...
The drone enabled vehicle is not as widespread as one would think, but when ever i hear of freakish crashes i first ask one question, Was it a Mercedes Benz? so far this is the one i have more than one example of remote access to look at, Just looking at Lady Dianna,s limo, Hastings 240, and the LV couple killed recently one can see there is perhaps some fire behind all this smoke. This guy is doing some work on SOME of this and avoiding the big dog in the play Mercedes Benz.... but have a look anyhow... [Link] Now have a look at this [Link]
Who is Dodge? Who is Jeep? Who is Sprinter? who was Daimler Benz?
If one was to do a search for car hacking video one can see the common hacker can do some pretty impressive stuff with the systems in a modern car. Now if you built that same car and had all the inside dope on all those systems i am sure the things that can be done all fall into the realm of magic. Most new cars have stuff that you would like no one to have remote control of, but most of that is you problem, they will have all sorts of ways to hide their work after you are a burnt crisp in the morgue......
Talk about scrutiny and going the extra mile!
After a very enlightening punch in the ribs from a side curtain airbag i started to look into this whole car hacking idea, the shit i found out about the STAR computer and how it was provisioned on the cars it was a part of i suddenly became a user of old and used cars from then on. At one point i was friends with a person that had a Mercedes Benz Ml-430 SUV... he was a serious skeptic untill i too kim for a ride in that car, after i demonstrated the ability of the car he was driving, how it was not just a matter of being a very capable car in the out of shape rigors we drove through, Gravel at high speed, ice hills snow drifts on the side of the road, what not he saw that i was not only right i was justified in pointing this stuff out to a user that was not aware of the nefarious ability of his car. I went through the entire owners manual and pointed out what could be done to him if the home office talking to his car wherever it was wanted to harm him... That talk hit home, he sold that SUV weeks later and bought a muscle car with nothing more electronic than the radio from GM. I could have told him over and over again but until i made it real by doing dangerous stuff, and having the car drive us out of it with interventions washis threat radar clued in to what may happen. He was before this a skeptic about what i was saying about Lady Dianna's car, after that drive he was clued in to the reality of computers and what they could do if someone wanted to.
Making this real for everyone is important, There is a vast amount of things that can be done with the high end cars out there, the more you pay for these systems the more you might have to worry if you anger the wrong class of folks. I saw just what was the danger because i have a keen mind for such stuff, the average person would never make the links i made about all this, this is why so many fail to perceive any danger, but thinking out side the normal to the what if is a hard path for some not given enough real to sort out the truth. My buddy with the ML-430 learned all about the ways the car worked for him in danger situations and i explained the ways it could be used to kill you if it was programmed to.
Point is BUYER BEWARE, just because you think you are safe is not being safe. Real drivers know EXACTLY what is in their car.
How many 757 pilots have this thinking? How many just TRUST the computer system blindly? Worse yet is how many pilots in charge of a fuselage full of human lives is aware they are not truly in ultimate control of the craft those lives are being transported?
How many would demand a fix if they were staring at the truth of the whole system?
I will never allow anyone else to have control of my auto, Never.
Now for the others still in harms way......
....said with kind intentions of course.
We can see the impact point pretty good, We have a number of velocity calculations to look at, He was really moving ...Well in excess of the speed limiting this auto would have had engaged to limit Vmax.
Then we have the video showing the fishtailing and really moving way past Vmax and can see in fact the car was having a cross control event. What i mean by cross control is the car is powered full and the braking system is engaged in a cross axle braking modulation that will allow very accurate vehicle control, in a good way it will right your course, in a bad way it will end your path in a wrapped around a tree event. The Mercedes boys have a lot of forensic data sets of cars wrapped about things like trees poles, police barriers....Trust me lots of em....The stupid dumb ass street racer to grama at the bottom of the hill... Lots. So in poking through these data sets would give the manufacturing company a great deal of control.... if they know to a Nth degree what is required to keep you safe it also must go that they can also do the inverse, and there we have a winner, going to the well once too often with out thinking these accidents like Lady Dianna and Hastings show that the high speed work is well understood... The men that use a safety system against the user of that system will eventually get busted... Lady Dianna Started a bunch of thinkers at this system, how it could be abused, Hastings going out like he did blew open the door to the whole thing for many.
The same can not be said about those that think a fly-by-wire aircraft is any different, the same sort of thing that allowed those crashes could allow a entire tank of fuel on a jetliner to fly around and do what ever they wanted., until the end of that tank...A 777 can fly for 12 plus hours. The entire time the persons on the aircraft would have little non catastrophic control. IF what i have heard is true the entire cabin can be gassed in the event of hijack....
Shanksville.has the look of an on board intervention to catastrophic end of flight. The others all had the look of drone control not human hand,but computer controls... i saw all the video of moving aircraft on that day i did not see any over control.. You bet the man is worried about hacking, huge, The zero day parties are going to be epic.
The fallout from Lady Dianna is going to shock........ an EPIC shock
And it is about time.
The formation of this backlash is our choice.....
The targets we attack will be of each man's care......
How hard those targets will be hit is a function of the payback deserved....
Some have real standing, Others will assume standing.....
We will see the court at work..... We will have to bend to new, old ways to survive the trials..
Much of the machinery holding us in chains will vanish VERY quickly...