GPS Spoofing – potential problems with drones and NYSE

In case you haven’t heard yet, the US government will be using drones to monitor our movements, well ok, the idea is to monitor movements of those trying to cross our borders or other illegal activities, but I suspect that regular citizens will be caught on camera much more often than “the bad guys”.  But guess what? It turns out that the GPS signal is one of the biggest security vulnerabilities we have encountered in a long time, and those signals can basically turn a drone into a missile. Here’s the full story of how a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin’s hacked into a drone’s GPS.

But this is just part of the story, and Fox News should have followed up with these researches on their other, and in my opinion, more important findings of what this vulnerability means. It turns out that you can also use GPS Spoofing to mess with the time stamps of financial transactions on the NYSE and NASDAQ. Here’s the link to that research paper:

http://radionavlab.ae.utexas.edu/images/stories/files/papers/summary_financial_sector_implications.pdf

Berg Insight – M2M Global Market Stats

Interesting statistics in Berg Insight’s recent M2M Market Research Report Abstract.

According to Berg, Chinese seem to be adopting M2M in a big way: “The most significant market development in 2011 was a major breakthrough for cellular M2M communication in Asia-Pacific. The number of M2M subscribers in the region increased by 64 percent to reach approximately 34.5 million at the year-end, fuelled by massive growth in China that almost doubled its cellular M2M subscriber base to approximately 21 million.” This explains conversation I had with the China Telecom person the Telecom Council event in San Jose recently about their need for an app to track all those bicycles 🙂

Looks like Ericsson shares my worries

This article validates many of the ideas that I expressed in my panel discussion a few weeks ago about the concerns I have regarding what really happens with all the data that is collected from all the millions and billions of devices that are being deployed as part of this Internet of things.

On one hand there is a utopian view of having various gadgets around us collect data and help us in preventing problems with things like our appliances and our cars for example. However on the flipside all this data as we have seen recently may be collected for intentions that we’re not even aware of and will paint patterns of activities that may be used for tracking us, or worse it may fall into hands of unknown entities, which may have even more nefarious intentions.