Look to the sky: How hackers could control cranes by abusing radio frequencies

Vulnerabilities in radio frequency protocols used by remote controllers could allow hackers to move cranes and other big machinery at construction sites and factories, security researchers said Tuesday, raising awareness of potential safety issues in widely-used technology. A research team at cybersecurity company Trend Micro examined remote controllers made by seven vendors and found that all of them were susceptible to “replay attacks,” in which an attacker transmits a recorded radio frequency (RF), tricking the machinery into responding to commands. In other words, the researchers said, the remote control you use to open your garage is probably more secure than many controllers used to move industrial equipment. The main problem, Trend Micro said in a paper published Tuesday, is that instead of relying on standard wireless technologies, the industrial remote controllers depend on proprietary RF protocols that are decades old and “are primarily focused on safety at the expense of […]

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No Moving Parts: Phased Array Antennas Move While Standing Still

If you watch old science fiction or military movies — or if you were alive back in the 1960s — you probably know the cliche for a radar antenna is a spinning dish. Although the very first radar antennas were made from wire, as radar sets moved higher in frequency, antennas got smaller and rotating them meant you could “look” in different directions. When most people got their TV with an antenna, rotating those were pretty common, too. But these days you don’t see many moving antennas. Why? Because antennas these days move electrically rather than physically using multiple antennas …read more

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AI Watches You Sleep; Knows When You Dream

If you’ve never been a patient at a sleep laboratory, monitoring a person as they sleep is an involved process of wires, sensors, and discomfort. Seeking a better method, MIT researchers — led by [Dina Katabi] and in collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital — have developed a device that can non-invasively identify the stages of sleep in a patient.

Approximately the size of a laptop and mounted on a wall near the patient, the device measures the minuscule changes in reflected low-power RF signals. The wireless signals are analyzed by a deep neural-network AI and predicts the various sleep stages …read more

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Here’s How Hacker Activated All Dallas Emergency Sirens On Friday Night

Last weekend when outdoor emergency sirens in Dallas cried loudly for over 90 minutes, many researchers concluded that some hackers hijacked the alarm system by exploiting an issue in a vulnerable computer network.

But it turns out that the hackers di… Continue reading Here’s How Hacker Activated All Dallas Emergency Sirens On Friday Night

4.4 GHz Frequency Synthesis Made Easy

How hard is it to create a synthesizer to generate frequencies between 35 MHz to 4.4 GHz? [OpenTechLab] noticed a rash of boards based on the ADF4351 that could do just that priced at under $30. He decided to get one and try it out and you can find his video results below.

At that price point, he didn’t expect much from it, but he did want to experiment with it to see if he could use it as an inexpensive piece of test gear. The video is quite comprehensive (and weighs in at nearly an hour and a half). …read more

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Real World RF Filter Design and Construction

We bet when [devttyS0] made his latest video about RF filter design (YouTube, embedded below)vi, he had the old saying in mind: in theory, there’s no different between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. He starts out pointing how now modern tools will make designing and simulating any kind of filter easy, but the trick is to actually build it in real life and get the same performance. You can see the video below.

One of the culprits, of course, is we tend to design and simulate with perfect components. Wires have zero resistance, capacitance, and inductance. Inductors …read more

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PCB Design Guidelines to Minimize RF Transmissions

There are certain design guidelines for PCBs that don’t make a lot of sense, and practices that seem excessive and unnecessary. Often these are motivated by the black magic that is RF transmission. This is either an unfortunate and unintended consequence of electronic circuits, or a magical and useful feature of them, and a lot of design time goes into reducing or removing these effects or tuning them.

You’re wondering how important this is for your projects and whether you should worry about unintentional radiated emissions. On the Baddeley scale of importance:

  • Pffffft – You’re building a one-off project that

…read more

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KeySniffer Lets Hackers Steal Keystrokes from Wireless Keyboards

Radio-based wireless keyboards and mice that use a special USB dongle to communicate with your PC can expose all your secrets – your passwords, credit card numbers and everything you type.

Back in February, researchers from the Internet of things security firm Bastille Networks demonstrated how they could take control of wireless keyboards and mice from several top vendors using so-called

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Hacker Hijacks a Police Drone from 2 Km Away with $40 Kit

A researcher has demonstrated how easy it is to steal high-end drones, commonly deployed by government agencies and police forces, from 2 kilometres away with the help of less than $40 worth of hardware.

The attack was developed by IBM security rese… Continue reading Hacker Hijacks a Police Drone from 2 Km Away with $40 Kit