Your fear of flying is only going to get worse once you hear what these white hat hackers figured out to do with a popular airliner.
As Wired reports, a team of security researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Oberlin College created a device the size of a coin that can take over the autopilot system of a Boeing 737 and change its flight plan, not to mention tampering with key values in its takeoff and fuel calculations.
According to its creators, the device could also change the data on a pilot’s screen so they don’t notice anything’s amiss — or even trick a pilot into making a disastrous decision.
“If you could get 60 seconds with an airplane, what could you do?” Stefan Savage, a UCSL professor who led the project, asked Wired. “Well, it turns out there’s a port that’s externally accessible. You can get to it with no special tools in about 15 seconds. And you can shove in a piece of electronics a little bigger than a quarter that lets you basically tell the autopilot what to do and lie to the pilot about changes to the flight plan.”
