A Second Drone War Won By Cyberattack

Those of you who followed the Lawfare Drone Smackdown will be interested in this post on DIY Drones:

We had a a great time at the Drone Games at the Groupon offices in SF today. (They used to be called the Drone Olympics until they got a cease-and-desist from the Olympic Organizing Committee). Nine teams competed, all using Parrot AR.Drones running Node.js software. I was one of the judges

The winners were:

• #1: James Halliday ("substack"), who wrote an insane virus that infects AR.Drones, which then infect other AR.Drones and causes them all to be p0wned and run amok.
• #2: A Stanford freshman team who wrote code that could allow one PC to simultaneously control many AR.Drones. (Not yet on Github but will be called "multidrone" when it is)
• #3 "TooTall Nate", who wrote a cool way to control an AR.Drone over the cell networks with a Verizon MeFi card, for unlimited range.

These guys are out of our league, but I thought it was interesting that cybersecurity played a role here too.

And in a nice touch, the medals were created--of course--on a 3D printer.